Mike Leath

In the past ten years,we've seen an increase in opiates overall. Let's turn the calendar back a few years. We used to have these pill mills. Matter of fact, they were so prevalent a cocktail or a combination of three drugs, Xanax, hydrocodone, and Soma was actually dubbed The Houston Cocktail.

Only the people with a lotta money could afford to buy the pills, so the people without so much money, they couldn't afford to buy the pills. So rather than just walk away from the drug, they switched to heroin. Heroin had gotten better. Heroin had gotten cheaper. Heroin had gotten easier to acquire here in Texas. Andthen the heroin started gettin' tainted with a drug called fentanyl. Not only have we seen an uptick in heroin use, we've seen a marked uptick in deaths due to the tainted heroin.