Government partnership to tackle fentanyl use in Tucson

City and county officials decided this week to pool their efforts — and funding — to boost the effort to curb fentanyl use here.

In unanimous votes during their respective meetings, the Pima County Board of Supervisors and the Tucson City Council entered into a 5-year intergovernmental agreement that pools their opioid litigation settlement funding. They say doing so could help reduce the use of fentanyl and other opioid use in the region “and its cascading destructive effects on lives and communities,” according to a joint news release this week.

“Pima County and the City of Tucson joining efforts to declare illicit fentanyl use as a public health crisis creates the cross-jurisdictional relationships needed to save lives,” said Adelita Grijalva, the board chair, in the release. “The opioid addiction crisis impacts every community in Pima County, and this effort builds the regional programming and outreach necessary to eliminate opioid addiction in the County; from Catalina to Amado and from Reddington to Ajo.”

The initial goals of the agreement and the use of settlement funds are to develop a regional awareness campaign and a regional response team to reduce opioid-related deaths and work with community groups to provide services after a non-fatal overdose.

The city and county partnership will provide overdose-prevention training, improve Narcan access, and develop a regional response plan. It is to include “evidence-based practices, youth intervention, multilingual/multicultural approaches to public outreach and programming that connects individuals and families to substance misuse and prevention services,” according to the release.

Still, it could take months to see results.

The One Arizona Opioid Settlement Funds — the result of settlement agreements from major opioid distributors that all 15 Arizona counties signed onto in 2021 — is expected to send more than $100 million over 18 years to the county, the release said.

The county health department is the lead agency for the agreement and distributes settlement funding to the participating municipalities in the metro area. The current split allocates 72% of the region’s settlement funding to Pima County and 23% to Tucson. Marana, Oro Valley, Sahuarita and South Tucson receive the remaining five percent.

To date, the county has received more than $17 million, the release said.

“We recognize this issue is so significant that it needs every level of government to work together, especially public health, public safety, housing and the courts,” Mayor Regina Romero said in the release.

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“The vision is to be able to affect the outcomes for our children in this community… This issue is not going to be solved with a public safety approach alone, and it shouldn’t,” Romero said during Tuesday’s meeting. “This is the beginning of how to work together with the county, I’m hoping, and hopeful, that besides opioid settlement, we are going to tap into federal funds and state funds to tackle this at every level of government.”

Some resources are offered already, such as the city’s prescription drug disposal program, Dispose-A-Med, or the county’s needle exchange program, LifePoint.

Naloxone, the medication that temporarily reverses an opioid overdose, is offered through Pima County’s Community Mental Health and Addiction program. An interactive map to find distribution sites can be found at: www.pima.gov/238.

CMHA also offers “brief interventions” for anyone 18 years and older. A schedule of those outreach events can be found at: www.pima.gov/2297.

Visit www.pima.gov/242 for a list of county resources.

Fentanyl, the highly addictive, relatively cheap synthetic opioid was responsible for 222 of the 374 fatal overdoses in the county last year. In 2022, 286 of the 495 fatal overdoses involved fentanyl. From 2017 through 2022, the year former Gov. Doug Ducey declared opioids a public health emergency, fentanyl-related deaths increased by more than 500% throughout the county, the Star previously reported.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Tucson earlier this month to discuss with Romero and other city leaders the consequences drugs like fentanyl have on communities like here.

About $35 million in federal funding is on its way to the state to help combat the crisis, Blinken said on May 3.

The city-county partnership is set for five years, but the agreement can be renewed three additional times, for five years each.