Following last minute shifts last week, a companion bill to another bill which would enhance fentanyl penalties was significantly amended to the ire of Jim Fleming who wrote the below letter to David Orentlicher, Sarah Peters, Leslie Cohen and Greg Koenig, members of the Assembly Health Committee. Here below is his letter republished in full from his LinkedIn:
You people on the health and human services committee and the lobbyists who convinced you to choose expediency and hand-washing over the lives of addicts--you have turned in a piss-poor day's work here. The original version of this bill would have saved lives. Would have fixed Nevada's worst-in-the-nation cause of death stats. Instead we are choosing butt-covering.
To be clear, with this amendment, this committee is CHOOSING willful ignorance, choosing not to honor hundreds of dead young folks by refusing, literally refusing to learn from their deaths. Refusing to go back through cases, confirm that our analytical tech and practices lag behind all other states and academic facilities for determining chemical cause of death.
I'm ashamed of you and my home state-- not only are we refusing to actually review overdoses, but this bill negates progress, sucks up valuable resources, and in facts shuts down investigations that would have taken place throughout the state. Science, hypothesis testing, asking the right questions, humbly reviewing past cases and maybe gently pointing out where somebody screwed up, empiricism and honoring the deaths of fentanyl overdose victims by learning from them-- all those concepts, the obvious course of action to any child or anyone giving a shit, those are not allowed in the room, or in most of the state. If you aren't going to help, get out of the way.
Big edit and update....there's a solid argument that the State of Nevada WILL BE FINANCIALLY LIABLE FOR EVERY FENTANYL OVERDOSE if this gutted, do-nothing version of AB132 gets passed.
And yeah I know legislators are immune from lawsuits in NV, but oh shooky dookies, turns out a couple people....in a position to know...will not carry the state’s water in a hypothetical deposition situation or whatever.
1. the committee itself wasn't pulling the strings when it was finally amended and voted upon.. The legislative process, counter to the public benefit, was subverted by pressure from etc. etc.
2. NV HHS has known for a long time that their response to the fentanyl crisis is at best incompetent and negligent. They were repeatedly told this...
a. implicitly by the published overdose stats of neighboring state agencies.
b. the CDC, and in fact there is a resident CDC overseer placed in Nevada because of the incompetence with overdose stats.
c. a consultant report by Mercer, paid for by HHS which goes into great detail about what in the states epidemiology reports is wrong, and how to fix it.
d. national data collection projects like SUDORS which every state except Nevada has figured out how to contribute meaningfully to.
e. Report from NV Minority Health Committee also showing that Nevada is dangerously negligent with regard to fentanyl AND that that cultural incompetence at all levels of HHS is literally killing people.
f. Formal complaint to Dept. of Justice demonstrating fraud waste and abuse of a SAMSHA block grant for substance abuse amelioration and study.
g. Virtually any statistician can show dangerous levels of incompetence by NV HHS analysts, specifically failure to identify a left censorship problem in overdose toxicology data that any child could have recognized as the result of fentanyl analyte insensitivity in various medical examiner labs.
AND THESE PROBLEMS WERE ALL REPORTED BY EXPERTS FOR YEARS WITH NO RESPONSE BY HHS.
3. AND finally....the coup de grace....we have the original draft of bill 132. Legislators understood the necessary steps to get ahead of the crisis. Comprehensively, and with all the expert input. And the bill was "gutted", their word, and amended down to nothingness. They had the knowledge, the means, and the ability to institute improved overdose response and chose to do the opposite. It’s a matter of public record.
4. Nevada instituted no monitoring, no insight, has no street game, no community contacts, no quick response system, and no tracking of changing adulterants in the supply.
5. thousands of victims' families who have been heartless[ly'] gaslit by NV HHS when it failed to ID the real cause of their accidental deaths.
6. The AG can't blame the victims after accepting the settlement from big pharma and tacitly blaming pharm for all the addiction.
I hope they bankrupt this state.