Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney announced the arrest of a 43-year-old Bellport man last week and at the same time seized 15 pounds of fentanyl - enough to kill all of Long Island's two million residents. Cops also confiscated 17.5 pounds of cocaine from the dealer's home.
Arrests like these save lives and given the incidence of fentanyl poisonings, every grain of the counterfeit drug confiscated will mean fewer empty chairs around the table at Thanksgiving.
Dealers sell fentanyl and cocaine because there's a robust market and an insatiable demand. To end the fentanyl crisis, we must reduce both that supply and demand, simultaneously.
Reducing demand for drugs means making sure that communities have access to mental health and addiction treatment on demand, relaunching the school-based drug and alcohol prevention programs that have lagged post-COVID and making sure that people who have found a path to recovery get the support they need as they rebuild their lives. In the meantime, let's use naloxone and other harm reduction methods to keep those folks - our people - alive.
I chatted with Fox 5's Jodi Goldberg about this arrest in an interview linked here and also with Newsday's Michael O' Keefe in the story below.
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