August 21 is National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day, but based on how some of the cities at the epicenter of the opioid crisis are acting, most Americans likely won’t even recognize it.
Take Portland, for example. Rather than worry about this top public health crisis, Multnomah County remains stubbornly hellbent on waging winless ideological crusades, putting politics before people and public health.
The county’s primary focus today appears to be promoting a lawsuit where it is attempting to secure $52 billion in damages from fossil fuel companies for allegedly causing the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heatwave. This is a winless battle. As the Washington Times put it, cases like this one are “built upon foundations of misinformation, baseless ideological talking points, and scare tactics” and “despite left-wing media’s fixation on these cases, the result of each will surely be the same – a colossal waste of time, resources, and taxpayer money.”
This pointless lawsuit is coming at a time when more Oregonians are dying from drug overdoses than ever before. The Oregon Health Authority has found that three of its residents are dying every day on average from unintended drug overdoses, while overdose deaths in Multnomah County this year are on track to outpace those in 2022.
Where is the county’s outrage over this crippling public health issue? When will the county begin prioritizing keeping its residents — especially its youth — away from drugs like fentanyl, which is now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 49? This may not be a sexy political fight, but governance isn’t supposed to be about waging political warfare. It’s supposed to be about protecting society’s most vulnerable.
That’s an uncontroversial point that Multnomah County appears willing to accept. It’s so distracted by politics that it’s putting too little time into what should be its core function.
Take the heatwave it’s now politicizing with its pointless climate change lawsuit. While the county is quick to point the finger elsewhere for the deaths that transpired, where was the county when residents clamored for it to open more than 5 of the 19 air-conditioned libraries to keep them safe? And where was it when scores of residents needed it to fix its out-of-date 211 call line, which led to far too many not receiving the help, care, and counsel they required during this time of significant vulnerability?
The only correct answer: nowhere to be found.
Even The Oregonian Editorial Board has conceded this point, writing that “the lack of diligence ahead of the heat wave is exactly the kind of lackluster oversight that we see playing out across too many county functions.” Indeed, as the title of its editorial claims, the county’s climate change lawsuit “does not count as governance.”
Multnomah County cannot afford to make the same mistake of prioritizing politics before governance with respect to its opioid crisis. As the Oregon Public Broadcasting Service put it, “the size of the problem here has multiplied well beyond the state’s ability to manage it. And the explosion of fentanyl into communities across the state has pushed an already unstable, understaffed treatment system, drained by the pandemic, to a breaking point.”
On this National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day, now is not the time for the county to sit idly. Now is the time for it to learn from its mistakes in the 2021 heatwave and act. It’s what its hurting families need and deserve.
