A string of overdose deaths in Macon County has local law enforcement and outreach nonprofit groups trying to find ways to combat more potent drugs in the area.
In one week in late May/early June, there were five overdoses in Macon County, three resulting in deaths.
“We are aware that there have been more than 42 overdose related ER visits, more than all of last year,” said Stephanie Almeida, executive director of the Smoky Mountain Harm Reduction Center. Almeida previously said overdose rates rose by 40% between 2019 and 2022.
No Wrong Door Director Sheila Jenkins said sometimes overdoses are coded as cardiac arrests in hospitals, skewering overdose statistics.
Almeida said her organization put up a Facebook warning/alert, notified the volunteers and increased the number of naloxone kits in their outdoor box.
“Factors contributing to increased overdoses may include shifts in drug potency, changes in drug availability, and broader social and economic dynamics impacting substance use patterns,” said Claudia H. Mattheiss, harm reduction coordinator at Western North Carolina AIDS Project.
One of those deaths was 30-year-old Daniel Stanfield, who died on May 28. His mother, Donna Nix, has been working with No Wrong Door to help others who are struggling with addiction.
“He was in my house and I could not save him,” Nix said of Daniel’s overdose which led to his death. “That’s probably the biggest thing bothering me.”
“I don’t know the answer, but I think families just need to be aware and educated. And I think it did help me in handling some of it and realizing that it was nothing that I did to cause it.”
Sheriff Brent Holbrooks said he’s known Stanfield and Nix his whole life.
“I thought the world of him,” Holbrooks said of Stanfield.
Stanfield had been in and out of jail due to his addiction. After his last release in March, Nix said her son was clean until the day he died.
Jenkins said those who have been clean for a few months are the biggest risk group to use again and overdose. Jenkins said another of those three deaths had been clean for a year.
Jenkins said she was with one of the recent overdose victims when they died and after a moment of thinking whether her efforts are in vain, she said there was a resolve to keep fighting harder.
“When we see what we’ve just experienced, I feel like we have to work harder, we’ve got to fight harder,” Jenkins said.
Nix said her son, like other users, thought they weren’t going to die by using drugs.
“I think he made a conscious decision [the first time],” Nix said. “I don’t think he knew what he was doing and honestly, he didn’t do this on purpose. This was not something he thought was going to happen to him. They think that they can handle more, they can handle whatever the next thing is. But they don’t have any idea that people are out to make a dollar and what they’re putting in it is just making them even more and more addicted so they’ll come back and they can keep making money.”
Jenkins said some users are overdosing regularly, claiming one person has done so 32 times in a three-to-four-year span.
“I can say for a fact, Daniel did not do this and think he was not going to wake up,” Nix said.
Jenkins said besides the victim, the family of the victim needs to heal as well.
“The family members are not doing the drugs, but they’re riding that train with them, and it affects them in a way that they may not realize,” Jenkins said. “I’ve seen families that you could basically say they’ve got PTSD, because they get so nervous if they feel like their person’s gonna use again, and they walk around all the time scared.”
Nix said she was on edge all the time, dreading when her son Daniel used again.
“You almost know it’s gonna happen. You almost know it, unless you get past a certain point,” Nix said. “If you’re not part of that, you’ll never understand it.”
Jenkins warns addiction can hit anyone, and she tries to combat the notion some people have that it doesn’t happen to their family. Jenkins said a grandmother told her they didn’t realize it was so bad and thought her family was immune to addiction.
“And the sad thing of it is, three weeks after she said that to me, her grandson died from an overdose,” Jenkins said.
Rise of fentanyl and carfentanyl
Holbrooks said MCSO has yet to get an official cause for any of the three deaths, saying they are waiting for the autopsies to confirm.
“Sometimes when things don’t happen immediately, we just think ‘Oh nothing ain’t being done,’” Holbrooks said. “It is being done, and I’m sure I would probably feel that way If I’d lost a loved one because you want answers right then.”
Holbrooks said whether it’s a suicide or overdose, MCSO treats every death as a homicide, but they’re harder to investigate because of trying to get into a victim’s phone and drugs being brought in from outside the county.
“It’s just so convenient to either run to Asheville or Atlanta and get this stuff, it’s just readily available,” Holbrooks said. “It’s unfortunate.”
Holbrooks said there’s likely fentanyl in all the meth coming into Macon County. Jenkins said users are taking the dealers at their word about the drugs they’re selling being clean.
“I doubt you could go out there and find a drug right now that’s just that one particular drug,” Jenkins said. “We have people that are in jail that want to get door-to-door treatment because they’re afraid to get back out there. I’ve had them come in here crying ‘Help me, help me, I’m gonna die If I don’t get help.’”
“We have people come in here and say ‘I’m just doing meth. I’m not doing that fentanyl stuff, that’s nasty,’ and I’ll say back to them, ‘Let us drug test you and I guarantee you’re gonna test positive for it,’ because there’s not just meth out there anymore,” Jenkins said. “Everything’s got fentanyl [in it].”
Jenkins and Holbrooks said they hadn’t heard much about carfentanyl until recently, which goes by the names “purp,” “purple ice,” “purple fire” and “purple heroin.”
Carfentanyl, an ultra-potent synthetic opioid, is used as a tranquilizer for large animals such as elephants and rhinoceroses.
“Carfentanyl and the Xylazine are not made for human consumption,” Jenkins said. “There’s nothing out there that can counteract it. Narcan won’t work on it, but it will work on whatever they’ve got it mixed with.”
“I’m going to say carfentanyl is a hundred times more potent than heroin,” Holbrooks said.
Jenkins said she was told one local agency had to use 10 Narcan kits on someone who overdoses on Carfentanyl. At one recent overdose death, a funeral home worker became “deathly sick” when encountering what is assumed to be fentanyl or carfentanyl.
While some users want to avoid fentanyl, Jenkins said others will try to find dealers who have drugs that lead to an overdose, “thinking they got some good stuff and that it won’t kill them.”
Nix said it’s easy for people to laugh and make disparaging comments about victims and look down on them because they are addicts.
“These people are dying, they belong to somebody, they have a family,” Jenkins said. “There’s a stigma to that, and a lot of the stigma is due to lack of education and lack of knowing.”
Nix said there needs to be consequences for the drug dealers who bring it to the vulnerable populations.
“If they do find somebody, I was like ‘I want to be sitting there [in court] with Daniel’s picture,’” Nix said.
‘If you see something, say something’
Jenkins said the best thing people can do is educate themselves about the dangers of illicit drug use and keep passing it on.
“The best communication is word of mouth, and if you get one person educated, they can talk to somebody else about it and carry it on until we become an educated community about it,” Jenkins said. “I encourage family members, if they know they have a loved one, to come in and talk with us.”
“Addiction doesn’t discriminate,” Holbrooks added.
“It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you think about how bad it is out there, but one life is one life saved,” Jenkins said. “And how many lives does that person touch? So their recovery can help someone else.”
“If you see something, say something,” Nix said, explaining that people Daniel knew have talked to her since his death about stuff she wished she knew beforehand.
“People just don’t want to tattle. They don’t want to out somebody, but it could save a life,” Nix said.
One thing all outreach nonprofits agree on is that Narcan/naloxone can save lives.
“Naloxone saturation can help reduce fatalities. Naloxone is a lifesaving intervention; it is not a treatment or magic wand to make people stop using substances. Naloxone enables breathing. Period,” Almeida said.
In early May, Smoky Mountain Harm Reduction Center dedicated a new “hope box” full of Narcan kits on Phillips Street, near where 26-year-old Brian Christopher Dills died in April 2017. Almeida previously said Dills’ friends dumped him there as he was suffering from an overdose, afraid of getting into trouble if they took him to the hospital. Dills was found days later.
Almeida said they aim to install a new Naloxone box around Hot Spot near downtown Franklin.
“We lost a young man there last Easter,” Almeida said of the Hot Spot location. “He died in the bathroom and was in the stall for hours before someone found him. If my memory serves me right, we lost two that weekend.”
The Macon County Jail has vending machines that distribute Narcan kits in the lobby, Almeida said.
Jenkins has kits that No Wrong Door offers to those leaving the jail. The kits include Narcan, fentanyl test strips and literature about drug crisis and suicide hotlines, plus more.
The important thing, Jenkins said, is to keep trying.
“You never know when that one time somebody does something it’s going to turn the person around,” Jenkins said. “There could have been 20 people before them try to do something and it didn’t work. But you never know when that one time is going to help somebody. You can’t write them off and ignore it. We have to try to continue.”
“I’d always tell Daniel, as long as he was breathing, there was always hope,” Nix added. “And I wasn’t going to give up.”