Fentanyl deaths, "most severe disaster since AIDS," US official

A city official in San Francisco described overdose deaths from fentanyl and other drugs as the most serious "disaster" in the city since the AIDS crisis.

"We are seeing a loss of life here that is twice as deadly as COVID-19 from drug overdose deaths. It is the most serious public health calamity we have faced in this city since the AIDS crisis, and it's getting worse," District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey told a town hall meeting hosted by the News Nation cable television network Monday.

He said city in the state of California was going through the deadliest year of drug overdoses in its history. "That is what is driving a lot of the highly visible kinds of street level crime, retail theft, and I believe we have to do more to involve law enforcement," he said.

San Francisco is one of the cities hardest hit in the US by addiction and homelessness.

Echoing Dorsey, Paul Humphrey, a deputy police chief in Louisville, Kentucky, said: "Fentanyl has been a crisis for years now. It's a scary, scary deal. The heroin and fentanyl crisis." Humphrey also said the issue was among the problems Black and brown communities have been facing for years.

"We shouldn't have to wait for something to become a pandemic or an epidemic for us to solve that problem. We should treat people like people and human beings and get to them before we reach a crisis level," he also said.

Dorsey, who has publicly acknowledged his personal struggles with addiction as he fights to maintain his sobriety, said: "As somebody who has been in recovery, I think if we can make an intervention in somebody's addiction and do it in a way that we're making sure that they have access to medically-assisted treatment and health services, we don't have to make this punitive. We can make it a lifesaving intervention"

California Highway Patrol this week reportedly seized 9.2 pounds of fentanyl -- enough to kill more than 2 million people.

More than 932,000 people have died in the US from drug overdoses since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The US hit a record of nearly 110,000 drug overdose deaths last year as it finds itself in the midst of a biting drug epidemic, as well.

Fentanyl is estimated to be between 50 to 100 times as powerful as morphine, and overdose deaths related to the synthetic opioid continue to rise. That includes a 56% increase from 2019 to 2020, according to the CDC.