BOCA RATON, Fla. — Kelly Nichols says she pictured how she’d die one day: She’d succeeded a long line of people who abused drugs, so turning to drugs seemed a certain, bleak future.

“It was only inevitable,” Nichols, now 57, said. “I woke up to it. I’d go to school with pot in my hair. So I knew that’s how I was going to die.”

And that may have been her fate had she not received help from recovery resources in Palm Beach County, where overdose-related deaths dropped by about 46% from 440 in 2023 to a projected maximum of 239 in 2024, according to Project Opioid.

These figures were celebrated during a symposium on Tuesday afternoon at Florida Atlantic University hosted by Project Opioid, a nonprofit aiming to bring together business, faith, education and philanthropic leaders to solve the overdose and substance abuse crisis.

Besides growing up surrounded by drugs, Nichols, who attended Tuesday’s event, said hip pain led her doctor to prescribing oxycontin, a powerful and highly addictive narcotic. Eventually, the doctor gave her fentanyl patches, she said.

“I was high as a kite, I was flying,” Nichols said. “And then once you stopped getting stuff from the doctor, then oh my goodness, it was like I was dying, it was like I had the flu for 10 people.”

It wasn’t until Nichols entered Wayside House, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for women in Delray Beach, that she began to recover. But not everyone ends up like Nichols, whose buoyancy for life is evident the moment she begins to speak. She said she herself has personally known more than a dozen people to die from overdose deaths, and Palm Beach County officials discussed Tuesday how to continue addressing the problem.

Dennis Lemma, the chair of the state task force on opioid abuse, said some people tell him overdose deaths are nothing more than natural selection at work. But Lemma, who spoke at Tuesday’s symposium, doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s incredibly alarming that anybody would feel that way,” Lemma, also the Seminole County Sheriff, said. “80% of the people that are addicted to opioids were at one time legally prescribed the drug by somebody that they trusted, so this is Big Pharma’s role in overprescribing somebody who is absolutely following the law, doing what was believed to be helpful to their condition, but created the addiction.”

Only Seminole County had a similar decline to Palm Beach County’s at about 42%, and Lemma said these drops are some of the highest the state has ever seen.

“A lot of great progress, a lot of things that appear to be promising, but you can’t allow the percentage of decrease, which is quite remarkable, to distract us from the volume of people, which is still incredibly high,” he said.

What’s working

The plunge in overdose deaths is not the result of lessened substance abuse — in fact, the exact opposite is true, officials say. Andrae Bailey, Project Opioid’s founder and CEO, said drug use and substance abuse is on the rise.

“What we’re seeing is an increase now nationwide and all over the state of Florida in drugs like cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and new drugs like xylazine,” a veterinary tranquilizer, Bailey said.

Bailey and Lemma attribute the overdose death decrease, despite the rise in substance abuse, to several factors, including “opioid antagonists,” as Lemma called them, and creating new legislation to continue holding drug dealers accountable.

Opioid antagonists, such as naloxone — an opioid-overdose antidote, which is commonly referred to by the brand name Narcan — reverse the effects of opioids. Naloxone has been deployed among sheriff’s offices across the state and no longer requires a prescription, so any citizen can acquire it now, too.

“The reduction in deaths across the state of Florida are largely because of the reversal drugs that are readily available to not only policing officials but to everyday average citizens,” Lemma said. “It’s very much about helping fellow citizens out, and it has very little effect on helping yourself. There hasn’t been one case in this country where a person has revived themselves from an overdose of poison. It’s about helping others out.”

While naloxone use is a more reactive approach, the threat of criminal charges for drug dealers is thought to also have helped curb the number of overdoses.

Many people who overdose are not intending to do so. During the symposium, bodycam footage was shared of when sergeant with the Lafayette, Colorado, Police Department responded to an unresponsive teen who had taken an opioid, unaware it was laced with a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl.

The sergeant gave the teen naloxone before she was taken to the hospital. Had the teen not received the antidote, she might have died.

Drug dealers who are found to have laced drugs with fentanyl could face prison time or fines, especially if someone they sold drugs to dies of an overdose. The problem is, these same consequences don’t currently apply to newer, dangerous drugs such as xylazine, Lemma said.

So, Lemma is pushing for a new bill, HB 57, that would “mirror the same sanctions for drug dealers that have been put in place for fentanyl for xylazine.”

“If we don’t do that, the drug dealer would be more attracted to use xylazine than fentanyl,” he said.

What else should be implemented

Despite the success in slashing the overdose death number nearly in half, officials on Tuesday emphasized the long road still ahead both in the county and beyond.

Keith Oswald, the chief of equity and wellness for the county’s school district, said that ensuring a high quality of drug education materials administered to students between sixth and 12th grade is crucial, but that can be challenging as the standards have changed a lot.

The Palm Beach County School District also is currently testing out vape detectors in some of the school bathrooms to curb vaping, to curb the “vaping epidemic” that Oswald said has struck not just the county but the entire nation.

“That is really getting the kids addicted at an early age and the way they’re marketing to the kids, the flavors, odorless, that they can hide it in plain sight they can smoke in class and you won’t know it’s happening, and it’s getting more and more challenging,” Oswald said.

Darcy Davis, the CEO of the county’s Health Care District, an independent taxing district that provides medical services, said continuing to focus on and expand prevention care also will be crucial to keeping overdose death rates low.

“We have to get upstream. We’ve got to prevent the crisis. We can’t keep focused on the fact that we’re in this constant state of panic,” she said during the symposium. We need to get “access for people when they’re not in that moment of jeopardy. … We have to kind of turn our heads a little bit from that reactive approach and get upstream and talk about how do we prevent this in the future.”

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