By Darla Kelsay, Certified Prevention Consultant, Substance Abuse Prevention Coordinator, MidSOUTH Center for Prevention and Training
A new documentary chronicling the fentanyl crisis in North Texas will help raise community awareness about the potent synthetic opioid and shatter the myth that overdose is not happening in the Lone Star State. Scheduled for release this month, Dancing with Death is the collaborative brainchild of three regional organizations dedicated to reducing overdose deaths and saving the lives of North Texans.
“We know it’s happening here,” stated Becky Tinney, Director of Special Projects for the Recovery Resource Council, the most comprehensive nonprofit behavioral health care provider in North Texas with campuses in Fort Worth, Dallas, and Denton. She along with Specialist Joshua Reyes of the Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) had been dealing firsthand with families who tragically lost a loved one to fentanyl overdose. The two agencies serve multiple shared counties. “When someone dies from fentanyl, they (families) want to know what happened, what you’re going to do about it, and how to prevent it.”
School administrators were also reaching out to Tinney and Reyes after students had overdosed and died. The schools desperately needed experts in the field to address youth about the dangers of fentanyl and explain that the powerful opioid drug, approved by the FDA to treat patients in severe pain, is found in unregulated counterfeit pills and illicit drugs, making it even more perilous.
“The uptick of fentanyl poisonings and death has brought about a lot of conversations about prevention education to the forefront,” said Tinney, a certified prevention specialist and licensed chemical dependency counselor. “The epidemic has broken down a lot of barriers that prevention education as a field has traditionally come up against in engaging with communities and schools because it is impacting everybody.”
Texas Health and Human Services reported in 2023 that, on average, five Texans die every day from fentanyl poisoning1. The state’s drug overdose deaths have increased by more than 75% in the past five years with a 2.1% increase reported by the Centers for Disease Control between February 2023 and February 20242. Several counties served by the Northern Texas collaborative organizations have some of the highest synthetic opioid mortality rates in Texas.
Even so, community readiness to address the issue in the region was low due to denial that fentanyl overdose was a local problem. It did not help that the documentary Tinney and Reyes were sharing during their educational talks on fentanyl featured folks from another state. “They were just not representative of North Texas communities. They did not look like us or sound like us,” said Tinney.
After realizing that communities viewing the documentary could not relate to the people sharing their stories or connect them to their neighborhoods, Tinney and Reyes got the idea to create their own documentary using the faces of the Texans they knew who were impacted by devastating loss. “We felt like we had all the pieces necessary to create something that was more representative of our communities,” she said. “It’s Important for the audience to be able to see themselves in the documentary.” The final project came to fruition over a series of months thanks to the collaborative efforts of the Recovery Resource Center, Texoma HIDTA, and the Dallas Area Drug Prevention Coalition - a longstanding DFC coalition that assisted in securing families to share their stories and some funding to produce the documentary.
Tinney says that the families involved in the filming wanted their loved ones remembered for something greater than using illicit drugs and overdose. Sharing their heartfelt stories was a way to highlight that fentanyl overdose can happen to anyone – even those youth who are on the honor roll or who have never been in trouble. “The overall prevention message is that awareness is so important,” explains Tinney, who encourages parents to have hard conversations with their children about fentanyl and other drugs. “We cannot wait for something to happen. With fentanyl, it really can be one time.”
A certified prevention specialist, Becky Tinney recently launched the agency’s Overdose Response Team program in both Dallas and Tarrant Counties and the Overdose Fatality Review Committee for Tarrant County – the first in the state of Texas. Becky oversees the Council’s position as the public health partner for the Center for Disease Control’s Overdose Response Strategy program for the North Texas region, a partnership program with the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program. She is also a contributing member on several opioid-focused task forces and work groups across the metroplex, including the City of Dallas’s Opioid and Fentanyl Strike Force, Tarrant County Public Health’s Overdose Workgroup, UNT Police Department’s Fentanyl/ Overdose Awareness Coalition, and Dallas ISD’s Substance Abuse Task Force. Becky is passionate about serving others, making community-level impact, and creating and leading programs that are aimed at reducing harm and making meaningful change.
The Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) is a federal program that aims to reduce drug trafficking and misuse by coordinating law enforcement, treatment, and prevention initiatives.
The Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) region encompasses seventeen counties in North Texas and eight counties in Oklahoma. The region includes two major drug market areas, the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area and Oklahoma City metropolitan area. It also includes three primary satellite areas: Amarillo and Tyler, Texas and Tulsa, Oklahoma. These markets constitute the most significant areas of illicit drug trafficking and abuse within the HIDTA region.
[1] Governor Abbot Unveils Texas Fentanyl Data Dashboard, July 13, 2023, https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-unveils-texas-fentanyl-data-dashboard
[2] Ahmad FB, Cisewski JA, Rossen LM, Sutton P. Provisional drug overdose death counts. National Center for Health Statistics. 2024.
