Interview With Colonel Sergio de la Peña
I had the opportunity to talk about this with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs Colonel Sergio De La Peña.Q: What can you tell me about the marijuana that’s being produced?
Colonel de la Peña: Marijuana was originally grown in fields. However, now there’s a lot of technology that has been increasing the THC levels in marijuana and there’s not a lot of regulation for this. Marijuana can be as potent as cocaine depending on how you hybridize it.
Q: How about fentanyl?
Colonel de la Peña: Fentanyl is a completely different animal. The addictive nature of fentanyl is extreme. It takes 2 milligrams for a lethal dose, as opposed to cocaine, it’s something like 6.5 grams, and 200 milligrams for heroin. Carfentanil takes 2 micrograms to kill you. What makes this even worse is that people are selling heroin and cocaine with fentanyl. There’s a reason for fentanyl and why it’s being produced, for severe pain. It’s just being abused.
Q: Where is this fentanyl being produced?
Interview With Dr. Sandra Martinez
I had an in-depth conversation with Dr. Sandra Martinez, an author and naturopathic doctor whose daughter tragically died from a fentanyl overdose.Q: Tell us the story of your daughter.
Dr. Martinez: Her name is Qarinna. She was a normal healthy girl, got diagnosed with a stomach illness, and what doctors typically do is they play medicine, so they gave her a lot of pain pills. They didn’t really find a way to treat the issue, so they gave her a lot of opiates for five years and [tested] her. When that all failed, they should have right away done a mental health test on her to see if she was an addictive personality, because she did have trauma from losing a son. She did have depression, she had all those underlying issues that could create addiction really easily, to numb the pain. So, they didn’t do that, and after over five years of them prescribing pain pills, she became an addict. When she wanted to get better help and real treatment to get off the pain meds, their treatment was so aggressive that she didn’t trust them. That’s when street drugs came in. ... It was easy for people on the street to say, “Well they’re already giving you morphine, they’re already giving you fentanyl in your fentanyl drips, they’re giving you fentanyl lidocaine patches ... so let’s just give you what they’re giving you, but a street value. So when doctors cut you off without finding real help, they leave you floundering like a fish with no water. For Qarinna, it was “let’s get my 10-dollar fix.”
Q: How did her opiate use affect her mental health?
Dr. Martinez: When the drugs are in your system as an opiate consumer, it affects your body in every way. It affects your sleep pattern, your eating, how you think. ... If you’re already dealing with emotions, and [the] drugs start to lower the serotonin and the dopamine, the body really starts to need more. ... It affects your physical body because your stomach doesn’t work anymore, your digestion doesn’t work. It hits you physically in all those areas. When street drugs [are] introduced, your body starts to sweat, your nervous system starts to react, you need something, and the doctors wouldn’t give her anything.
Q: You were talking about how the doctors could have prevented this situation by having Qarinna take a test to see if she had a tendency for addiction to opiates. How do you think that these types of situations of addiction to drugs can be avoided?
Dr. Martinez said that when somebody like her daughter gets addicted and tries to get into treatment with her IEHP state insurance, along with a person who has an HMO or PPO, her daughter would be last in order to get it. This caused Qarinna to hop from hospital to hospital, from different cities to different counties in order to get meds. When all else fails and the medical community has nothing to give, the option is either to suffer in pain by detoxing on a hydration drip or go to the streets for illicit drugs to replace the opiates. So as a result, she resorted to drugs on the street which were easier and faster to get.
It is a shame to see how detrimental substances have tainted our world. If action is not taken to prevent more overdoses and mental health problems induced or worsened by these drugs, our nation will fail to remain great.