GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Brown County is encouraging parents to talk to their children about the new F-word.
Fentanyl is growing problem in the county and across Wisconsin.
Last September, Brown County declared fentanyl as a community health crisis and launched a public awareness campaign.
In the beginning, the county focused on spreading awareness through billboards and held public listening sessions in which community members shared how fentanyl has impacted their lives.
On Thursday, leaders announced the next step in the campaign.
Brown County Public Health Officer Anna Nick says the next step is to get parents to explain to their children what fentanyl is and and the dangers of it.
“In our house, my husband and I have four children, ages range from 11 to 19. I asked each and every one of them, what is fentanyl? And not one of them could tell me what it was,” Nick said.
Health officials say fentanyl is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and up to 100 times stronger than morphine. Because it is strong and cheap to produce, people who manufacture illegal drugs use fentanyl to make other drugs more powerful and less expensive to make. Fentanyl can be added to pills, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, and other drugs.
To help parents start the conversation at home, the county teamed up with school districts to send information through the mail.
“We encourage parents to talk to their kids about fentanyl so they understand that just a little bit, the size of a grain of salt, could be mixed into an illegal substance such as a pill or marijuana, without their knowledge and they could take it and it could kill them,” Nick said.
Fentanyl can also be mixed into legal substances.
“People who are going on the internet to buy prescription drugs, the generic brands, just to try and save some money because of inflationary costs, are buying stuff that they didn’t know was actually counterfeit or being laced and so the reality is, it’s coming at us in all different angles,” said Brown County executive Troy Streckenbach.
The information packets will also be sent to all Brown County residents to get the word out.
Future goals of the awareness campaign is to go statewide.
“What we’ve done is made it very easy for counties to pull our logo off and to put their logo on and send it out because when you read the materials, it can be used anywhere,” Streckenbach explained.
Online videos and information are available as well.
In Brown County, the number of fentanyl involved overdose deaths has risen every year since 2018. That number peaked in 2021 at 39.
