Star Tribune

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek says that if the state’s largest county had experienced 153 homicides last year —instead of 46, the actual number —people including those on this newspaper’s Editorial Board would be pounding him and other elected officials with demands to do more to reduce the toll.

The outcry should be every bit as intense about the 153 preventable deaths in the county last year caused by overdoses of heroin or synthetic opioids. Stanek says he’s doing his best to respond to the mounting death toll as if public pressure were high. He’s calling on other elected officials to do the same.

That call deserves our echo. The sheriff’s focus on the opioid epidemic is well-placed. While Minnesota does not rank among the states most heavily affected by the addictive scourge and the deaths it causes, this state has not been spared. And its trend lines are moving in the wrong direction. The statewide death toll in Minnesota in 2016 was 406, up 17 percent from the prior year.

In Hennepin County, the death rate’s climb has continued this year. Through the end of May, Stanek’s office said, opioids had claimed 63 Hennepin County lives, compared with 55 through the same period in 2016 and 43 in 2015. Worse yet: the killer drug carfentanil has arrived in Minnesota and is responsible for nine of this year’s Hennepin County overdose deaths.

Five metro counties —Hennepin, Ramsey, Washington, Anoka and Dakota —were granted federal “high intensity drug trafficking area” status last year, freeing up federal resources and removing red-tape impediments to law enforcement’s response to illegal drug dealing. Stanek and sheriffs from the other four counties are now seeking more help from state government as well. Last week, Stanek wrote to Gov. Mark Dayton on behalf of all five counties’ sheriffs, asking that Dayton declare the opioid crisis a “public health emergency, as well as a public safety threat” in the state.

That official designation at the state level would not automatically trigger a particular response. But Stanek believes that such a declaration, buttressed by frequent mentions from the gubernatorial bully pulpit, would make a positive difference.

“Governor, alert all Minnesota residents to this public health epidemic,” the letter urges. Tell those who prescribe opioids about their danger; warn pharmaceutical companies that this state means to drive down the prescribing of these drugs; propose stricter penalties for dealers in the deadliest drugs, carfentanil and fentanyl; and make the emergency antidote naloxone more widely available to first responders around the state.

We can’t argue with any of that. But we’d add to the list a redoubling of strategies already being pursued by Dayton and key legislators —including two who lost children to overdoses, GOP Rep. Dave Baker of Willmar and DFL Sen. Chris Eaton of Brooklyn Center. For example: They could use the sheriffs’ help in lobbying the Legislature to put a surcharge on prescription painkillers —the recommendation last session was for a penny a pill —to pay for a variety of prevention and public-education measures. That measure stalled at the 2017 Legislature when it drew heavy fire from the pharmaceutical lobby, Baker and Eaton said.

The Dayton administration also has worked to provide easier access to drug treatment programs, particularly in greater Minnesota, and to inform those on the front lines of treatment efforts about the latest research in drug-assisted therapies, Lt. Gov. Tina Smith said last week. And the administration has resisted Republican efforts in Congress to cut Medicaid, which pays for more than half of the substance abuse treatment provided in Minnesota, Smith said.

Dayton’s focus on treating the opioid crisis as a chronic disease epidemic is not misplaced. But neither is Stanek’s concern about preventing addiction through a variety of public-education and law enforcement measures. Treatment and prevention efforts should all come under scrutiny from the state’s public-policy stewards in light of the latest opioid death toll. And Minnesotans should be pressing those stewards to do more.