PORT ANGELES — On Dec. 11, Nora Eastman found her son dead in his truck in the driveway of their home on the Lower Elwha Klallam Reservation, foaming at the mouth, nose and ears from a fentanyl overdose.
Just two days earlier, her stepchildren had buried another brother who died from a fentanyl overdose. A friend of her late son died from the same thing a month earlier.
“In 48 hours, my stepchildren had to bury two brothers because of the same thing,” Eastman said. “My stepson still hasn’t recovered. I’ve seen him this morning and he hasn’t stopped crying in a week, and I can’t say I blame him.”
Nora’s son, Ted Eastman, was 33 years old with a seven-year-old daughter when he died. He had struggled off and on with substance abuse for several years, Eastman said, and had been clean for 90 days.
Eastman’s other son, Grant, is in a debilitated state, unable to walk or speak more than a few words at a time, the result of brain damage from unknowingly taking a pill that was laced with fentanyl.
“I’ve seen the damage it’s done front and center for far too long,” Eastman said.
Sadly, Eastman isn’t alone.
In Clallam County, there were at least 26 fatal overdose deaths from all drugs, 13 of which had fentanyl present. Another 21 suspected overdose deaths are still awaiting confirmation from the crime lab.
“Of those, most of them are the result of mixed drug toxicity,” said Nathan Millet, Clallam County deputy coroner. “People tend to abuse multiple substances.”
With the pending suspected overdoses, Clallam County is looking at 47 fatal drug overdoses in 2023, “which is significantly higher than any year we’ve had in the past,” Millet said.
Jefferson County also has seen an increase in illegal drug overdoses, but numbers were not posted on the state Department of Health website. Requests for comment from Jefferson County coroner’s office were not returned.
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Detective Sgt. Brett Anglin said newer, high-potency pills arrived in the county at about the same time as the Blake decision essentially decriminalized drugs. That and the COVID-19 pandemic and an increase in homelessness has led to a very difficult situation with fentanyl.
“It’s been unchanged since the Blake decision and prior to,” Anglin said.
One of the things driving the increase in overdoses is fentanyl is being mixed into other drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine and even cannabis.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid — “like heroin but thousands and thousands times more powerful,” Millet said — and it’s used in very controlled doses in medicine. But the fentanyl that’s driving the overdose crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere is illicitly manufactured and taken in doses far higher than would be used in a medical setting.
As a depressant, opioids slow down respiratory rates and can cause people to stop breathing entirely. But the opioid is often combined with other drugs that have the opposite effect, such as methamphetamine, Millet said, which can create a toxic effect.
“It’s like slamming on the brakes and flooring the gas pedal at the same time,” Millet said.
A rescue drug for opioid overdoses, Naloxone, is widely distributed and can reverse the effect of an opioid overdose within seconds. But the fentanyl being taken is so powerful that it can take multiple doses of Naloxone to revive a person, and Naloxone reverses only the effect of the opioid. Any other drugs taken at the same time will be unaffected.
It’s difficult to say what exactly is driving the increase in overdose deaths, other than the prevalence of fentanyl itself.
Eastman said her son had turned to drugs to numb the trauma he had experienced.
“He had his own demons, he had his own pain that he had to go through in life,” Eastman said. “I wish years ago he’d said something so I could have helped him but he turned to the only thing he knew how, and that was using because he wanted to forget about it.”
Eastman wants to see harsher punishments for drug dealers.
“I have to live with this every day of my life knowing that they’re out there walking around still doing what they’re doing while I have to bury my son,” Eastman said, “and nothing’s being done about it.”
Law enforcement agencies at all levels are doing quite a bit, but stemming the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. is proving difficult. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, many of the chemicals used to make fentanyl originate mainly in China but also India, and are processed and smuggled into the country by Mexican drug cartels.
Washington state does charge people with what’s known as a controlled substance homicide when someone dies as the result of a drug overdose, but proving those cases can be very difficult, according to Michelle Delvin, Clallam County chief criminal deputy prosecuting attorney.
“We have to establish who delivered it, we have to establish that but for those drugs that person would not have died, so that’s the difficult leap,” Delvin said. “Establishing the delivery and they only received controlled substance from the one person is also difficult to establish.”
Clallam County has prosecuted two controlled substance homicides in the past two years, both from methamphetamine.
“It’s so difficult to prove but in trying to hold people responsible for all these deaths that are occurring we’re trying to investigate it more,” Delvin said. “It takes numerous investigators and a lot of time to track it down and then it may not get to where you need to. It’s very difficult to establish.”
Dismantling drug trafficking organizations typically requires the use of confidential informants and close collaboration with federal partners.
“The best thing that we can do from the sheriff’s office side is continue to increase our staffing so that we can have more dedicated detectives to do drug interdiction because most of the time these are complex investigations,” said Amy Bundy chief criminal deputy with the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office, who runs the county’s dug task force the Olympic Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Team, which includes Jefferson County.
But that can be difficult. Law enforcement groups across the country are experiencing a staffing crisis and in Washington state, the Department of Commerce is considering opening up the grant funding traditionally used to support drug task forces to other uses.
“We are 100 percent grant-funded and right now our grant, and the (Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant) is under fire by the State of Washington, effectively opening it up to all sorts of other entities to apply for those monies which is going to take it away from us.” Bundy said.
Eastman said she felt compelled to speak out because she believes news of overdose deaths has become too common and said she wanted to do something.
She’s started a GoFundMe page and hopes to travel to Washington, D.C., in July to tell her story.
“I don’t want any more mothers to bury their sons because it’s tough and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
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Reporter Peter Segall can be reached at peter.segall@peninsuladailynews.com.
