An increase in fatal drug overdoses and drug-related violent crime among young people are two priorities Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics Director Steven Maxwell said Thursday that the agency is working to combat.
Speaking to the McComb Exchange Club, Maxwell said abuse and addiction, particularly to hard drugs such as opioids, methamphetamine and fentanyl, are fueling a lot of the state’s problems related to public health and criminal justice.
“In 2020 Mississippi saw that we lost 529 of our citizens as it relates to drug overdoses deaths and that number has increased since 2015,” Maxwell said. “That is a microcosm of what’s we’ve seen throughout the country.”
Drug use and addiction is leading to many societal problems, especially among children who are exposed to drug use in their homes, Maxwell said. He said 8.7 million children in the U.S. live in a home where one parent is dealing with a substance abuse disorder, whether it’s alcohol or illicit drugs.
Last year, “the Department of Mental Health in Mississippi identified 28,000 pregnant and parenting women who were dealing with a substance abuse issue,” he said. “That was 28,0000 babies who were born in this state last year who were born with some sort of substance abuse disorder.”
Without intervention, those babies could end up developing behavioral health, mental health or substance abuse disorders.
Citing a national survey, Maxwell said 5% of pregnant women in the U.S. admitted to using one or more illicit substances during their pregnancies.
He said much of the violent drug-related crime taking place throughout the state is being committed by younger people.
“It’s likely that the 14- to 25-year-olds who are involved in the all of the violent crime activity, at one point either used drugs or they were exposed to some sort of childhood trauma” involving drugs, he said.
Addressing children’s exposure to drugs at home now will likely prevent similar problems in the future, Maxwell said.
“Fourteen to 25 years from now, they’ll be the kids we’re reading about in the newspaper. They’ll be the kids we’ll be seeing on the news,” he said.
The MBN, which has 95 agents working in 10 regional offices across the state, is hoping to shore up regional units with a focus on violent crime.
As for those caught in the trap of addiction, Maxwell said the MBN is focused on both treatment and punishment.
“You will hear some people say, you can’t arrest your way out of it. That’s true but you cannot not arrest your way out of it,” he said. “As we move forward with our efforts to stop those who are involved in the sale of drugs, we also have to evolve to expand our partnerships … to identify those individuals who are better suited for treatment.”
One of the ways the agency is doing that is by using the Screening Behavioral intervention Rehabilitation Treatment Portal. Agents are putting cards with QR codes in the hands of health care providers. When scanned, it leads them to an online screening tool to identify substance abuse and behavioral problems.
“It will give you a preliminary assessment and it will give you treatment facilities in your areas,” he said.
Maxwell said the Mississippi State Department of Health has grant funds available to pay for treatment, but many people, including health care providers, aren’t aware of that. The MSDH also has funds to reimburse doctors and nurses for their time to screen patients.
There are a lot of misconceptions about how treatment and recovery works, he said.
“A lot of people think when a family member detoxes, that’s treatment,” Maxwell said. “Detox puts people on a path for treatment. Recovery is for the rest of your life.
“You’ve got to be willing to sacrifice who you were in order to become who you want to be. You’ve got to change your environment. You’ve got to change the people you interact with and associate with.”
Turning to other issues, Maxwell said agents are busy cracking down on illicit substances being sold openly in stores across the state, such as Kratom, a Southeast Asian plant with opioid properties, as well as vapes containing synthetic cannabinoids, which are illegal, that are being sold under the guise of legal CBD products.
He said homegrown meth labs have mostly gone away thanks to state precursor laws that have made ingredients such as the cold medicine pseudoephedrine unavailable for over-the-counter purchase.
But the demand is still there and superlabs run by Mexican cartels are providing the supply, he said.
Smugglers are using body carriers, animals, bulk shipments of liquids such as water and soda with illicit substances suspended in them and even submarines to get their product into the U.S.
“We still see methamphetamine being imported, trafficked and sold in our state,” he said, adding that in some cases, fentanyl and meth are being transported and sold as fake pharmaceutical drugs, with the majority of the counterfeit pills containing potentially lethal doses of fentanyl, a powerful opioid that’s stronger than morphine.
Maxwell didn’t mention marijuana until asked about the prospects of medical marijuana legislation that’s likely to be debated in the upcoming legislative session.
He said he agrees with Gov. Tate Reeves’ call for stronger limits on potency and quantities that would be allowed to be sold, if approved.
“We don’t want a program that is going to be written as something medical but it’s actually recreational,” he said. “We’re going to enforce our state’s uniform controlled substances act as it is written now and as it is written in the future.”
