Illicit drug use has taken a new and dangerous turn, Eunice Police Chief Randy Fontenot said at Board of Aldermen’s meeting Tuesday.
Many of the drugs are illegal to obtain, but have dire consequences for some users, he said.
“They are using the synthetic marijuana, the potpourri. They’ve got different names for it, but that stuff seems to be a lot more dangerous than the real marijuana that we’ve been having problems,” he said.
“Crystal meth is another one that we are having trouble with. Those seem to be the two major problems that we have in Eunice right now,” he said.
“What we are seeing in people that we normally have in our jail that we don’t usually have problems with — they are coming in now with — it is actually brain damage after they smoke this stuff,” he said.
People who are intoxicated are usually brought to the jail and held for 24 to 36 hours to “let the stuff get out of their system,” he said.
“But that hasn’t been the case lately,” he said. “A lot of the people we’ve been arresting we’ve been waiting those 24, 36 hours for them to get back to normal, to let the drugs pass through their system, for them to get better, but it is not happening. They are staying in that state.”
The condition of one person recently arrested has not changed in two weeks, he said.
Fontenot said, “We’ve even heard they are taking this stuff and spraying Raid on it then smoking it.”
Raid is a trade name for an insecticide.
There have been deaths attributed to the drugs, he said.
“The drugs today are more dangerous than what they used to see in the past,” he said.
The users span all ages, he said.
Police also are encountering the opioid problem where people obtain the drugs legally, but become addicted, he said.
Police are seeing people addicted to opioid that “you would never think of using drugs.”
Solving drug problems is no longer an issue of police arrested “big drug dealers,” he said.
The problem is broad and is going to be hard to address, he said.
