The Sedona Red Rocks Rotary Club hosted guest speaker Bill LeBeau, a former Camp Verde town councilman who now works with the Methamphetamine Advisory Task Force anti-drug lobbying group, during the club’s Sept. 20 meeting at the Sedona Public Library.

LeBeau delivered a presentation focused on the dangers of fentanyl.

Source of Fentanyl

“Fentanyl’s a good drug,” LeBeau assured his audience. “Morphine is a great drug … [if] very carefully guarded.”

“The fentanyl primarily that we’re concerned with is coming across the border,” LeBeau said. “The precursor chemicals come from China.”

He said that from Mexico, cartels make the fentanyl into pills “and ship them across the border by the millions … It’s highly addictive and it’s cheap.”

When asked the reason for fentanyl’s low cost, LeBeau said, “It’s the precursor chemicals, I guess, don’t require a great deal, and they’re coming from China, which is probably evil and wrong in itself.”

Asked if he knew the ratio between domestic and imported fentanyl production, LeBeau replied, “I don’t. I doubt that there is much at all if there is any domestic production.”

A 2021 study in the International Journal of Mental Health Systems and a December 2022 Congressional Research Service paper both found that following China’s May 2019 restriction of fentanyl analogues and precursor chemicals and its negotiation of collaborative agreements on drug suppression with the United States government, the availability of Chinese-originating fentanyl and related chemicals has declined sharply.

Production has also shifted north from Mexico to British Columbia, with two Royal Canadian Mounted Police raids alone in 2022 and 2023 turning up amounts of precursors sufficient to produce several hundred million lethal doses of fentanyl.

“There’s a new methamphetamine out there that’s crazier than the first methamphetamine,” LeBeau said. Methamphetamine is a single chemical compound consisting of two enantiomers, both of which were first synthesized in 1893.

‘Pharming’ or Urban Legend

LeBeau claimed that “pharming parties” are real and a problem in Arizona: “Sometimes they throw a bottle of pills in a bowl and mix them up like M&Ms and you take your chances with what you pull out.”

While the term first emerged in 2002 and was reported as a threat, drug policy experts, law enforcement agencies and journalists have consistently been unable to find any evidence that such parties actually exist.

LeBeau twice quoted a Drug Enforcement Administration assertion that “six out of 10 of the [counterfeit] pills seized coming into the country contain a potentially fatal dose of fentanyl,” which he attributed to drug dealers trying to get people addicted because it’s “good for business.”

A 2023 study in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence found the prevalence of fentanyl in Mexican-manufactured counterfeit pills to be much lower, at 30%. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Sept. 1 that only 4.7% of all overdose deaths involved counterfeit pill use.

LeBeau displayed a MATForce flyer showing a bowl of unidentified colored pills. “This is all fentanyl. And it’s all pretty colors, we call them ‘skittles,’ and who do you think they’re making those for? Who’s going to eat those? Children, right?”

Investigations by National Public Radio and the Washington Post showed that this 2022 claim by the Drug Enforcement Agency was not backed by any evidence of drug dealers targeting youths with colored pills.

“It’s a variant of the ‘dealers are giving out drugs packaged as Halloween candy’ urban legend, one that similarly makes little sense upon even passing consideration,” the Post wrote.

Perception of Risk

When asked how grade-school students would be able to identify unmarked pills as fentanyl and then obtain the drug, LeBeau replied, “Inner cities are a lot different.”

“We have a K-through-12 MATForce curriculum that is really very good,” LeBeau mentioned near the end of his presentation. “Currently we’re doing ninth-graders at Camp Verde Middle School … They’re just insane. I don’t have any idea what’s going on in schools right now.”

MATForce Executive Director Merilee Fowler explained that the curriculum focuses on creating a perception of risk among youth and presenting substance abuse as incompatible with career goals.

“When kids associate a risk with a substance, they’re less likely to use it,” Fowler said. “Perception of risk is directly related to youth use. If perception of risk goes up, youth use goes down.

“A big thing that we do is we talk about their goals, what are the goals that they have for themselves, what do they want to achieve, and talk about how using that substance is something that will prevent that goal from happening.”

Fowler added that discouraging alcohol and marijuana use and vaping are the curriculum’s main focus areas.

Many of MATForce’s materials contain incomplete information, selected data and anecdotal evidence rather than statistics and data.

Marijuana

According to the 2022 Arizona Youth Survey for Yavapai County, a data source that Fowler said MATForce relies upon, marijuana was the second-most-used drug among local teenagers after alcohol, with 46.3% of students having tried it in some form by the time they reach 12th grade.

In its “fact sheet” on signs and symptoms associated with substance use, MATForce claims that the symptoms of marijuana use are pupil dilation, dry mouth, diminished inhibitions, short-term memory impairment, increased appetite, muscle spasms and impaired judgement. In a second marijuana-specific “fact sheet,” MATForce claims that additional effects include anxiety, depression and psychosis.

Marijuana has been legalized for medical and recreational purposes in 38 states, including Arizona. The primary symptoms of marijuana use include positive mood, euphoria, hedonia, spirituality, enhanced sensory perception, verbal fluency, divergent thinking, prosocial behavior, empathy and fairness, enhanced aesthetic appreciation, sexual arousal, pain relief, relaxation, neuroprotection, fear extinction and reduced aggression, anxiety and depression. Only 18% of marijuana users report negative effects on their wellbeing from marijuana use.

MATForce’s literature states “today’s cannabis isn’t the same stuff from ‘back in the day.’ Levels of THC, the chemical that gets you high, are 300% higher than the were in the 1990s.”

“It’s so strong that it’s causing psychosis in some people that use it, and in many, many cases irreversible,” LeBeau said of modern marijuana.

The highest-THC cannabis strains currently on the market today may exceed 30% THC content. This is a small increase from high-THC strains of the 1960s, such as Acapulco Gold, which reached 23% THC. The average THC content of the nearly 100 strains currently being sold in Sedona’s dispensary is 21%.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse has no record of marijuana causing an overdose death. The uncommon occurrence of psychosis among marijuana users typically resolves within six hours and very rarely lasts more than one week, according to the 2012 book “Medical Toxicology of Drug Abuse: Synthesized chemicals and psychoactive plants,” by Donald Barceloux, M.D., a clinical professor of medicine at University of California, Los Angeles.

MATForce stated that adolescent marijuana use causes permanent cognitive impairment, but multiple studies [Jackson et al 2016; Zehra et al 2018; Ross et al 2020] from the National Institute of Health “suggest that lower IQ may be a risk factor for cannabis abuse rather than the use of cannabis resulting in neuropsychological decline,” and that genetic and environmental factors that correlate with reduced intelligence may increase an individual’s likelihood of using cannabis rather than cannabis decreasing intelligence. A meta-review of 15 studies conducted by the University of California San Diego’s School of Medicine found that the long-term effects of marijuana use on memory and cognition was limited to “a very small effect on learning new information.”

Studies documenting the primarily positive effects of cannabinoids have included:

• Vigil, Stith and Chanel 2022
• Shafer et al 1972
• Batalla et al 2020
• Ameri 1999
• Pesta et al 2013
• Osborne and Fogel 2008
• Wenzel and Cheer 2018
• Schafer et al 2012
• Minor et al 2014
• Zou and Kumar 2018
• Liu et al 2009
• Whiting et al 2015
• Borgelt et al 2013
• Roitman et al 2014
• Miczek, Fish and De Bold 2014
• Garcia-Gutierrez et al 2020
• Lisboa et al 2019
• Furini, Myskiw and Izquierdo 2014

Vaping

The Arizona Youth Survey reported that e-cigarettes are the third-most-used drug among local teenagers, with 43.9% of those in Yavapai County having tried them by 12th grade; tobacco is the fourth-most-used substance, having been tried by 18% of teens. Convincing these students of vaping dangers is one of MATForce’s highest priorities.

Its “fact sheet” on vaping states “studies show that vaping can harm teen brain development and long-term mental health, lead to addiction and damage the lungs” and that the effects of vaping are anxiety, depression, psychosis and lung scarring.

The 2016 U.S. Surgeon General’s report on e-cigarette use among youth acknowledged that the claim that nicotine can adversely affect adolescent brain development is speculation based on animal rather than human studies and cited no direct evidence of nicotine-caused long-term impairment in youth. A November 2022 review of studies on nicotine use among adolescents in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that e-cigarette use was not a “gateway” to smoking tobacco, had no effects on lung health and was associated with 95% lower risk of harm than tobacco use. The review also pointed out that there is no evidence that vaping chemicals cause cancer and that 2019 claims of vaping-caused lung injury resulted from the addition of vitamin E acetate to black market vape cartridges; “it disappeared after VEA was removed from the illicit supply chain.”

A meta-analysis of 41 studies of nicotine use that appeared in Psychopharmacology found substantial beneficial effects from nicotine use, including improvements in cognition, attention, memory, fine motor control and mental health.

Psychedelics

“Now mushrooms are coming back because they’re being legalized in some states, and we’re seeing an increase in LSD,” Fowler said. The Arizona Youth Survey found that hallucinogens were the fifth-most-used drug among local teenagers, with 11.7% of students having tried one or more psychedelics by 12th grade.

In its “fact sheet” on signs and symptoms associated with substance use, MATForce states that the symptoms of classical psychedelics, including mescaline [peyote], psilocybin mushrooms, Jimson weed, morning glory, LSD and MDMA, which is sometimes called “ecstasy,” are hallucinations, flushing, increased heart rate and respiration, synesthesia, pupil dilation, laughter, mood swings, hyperthermia and dehydration.

Harmful effects occur in a very small minority of psychedelic users, with only 3% of psilocybin users and 2% of LSD users reporting negative effects on their wellbeing, compared to 60% and 67% of users, respectively, reporting positive effects.

The primary effects of the classical hallucinogens, which MATForce does not mention in its literature, are euphoria, mystical and spiritual experiences, enhanced visual perception, disinhibition, positive mood, introspection, relaxation, neurogenesis; reduced egotism, anxiety, depression, addictive and suicidal behavior, fear of death, aggression, competitiveness and materialism; and increased imagination, mental flexibility, cognitive function, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, tactile sensation, sociality, cooperation, empathy, trust, tolerance and immune response.

Oregon legalized psilocybin in 2020, Colorado decriminalized it 2022 and the Australian government now allow psychiatrists to prescribe MDMA or ecstasy and psilocybin to patients with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

A maximum of two deaths stemming from psilocybin overdose have been reported in the academic literature. No death from an LSD overdose has ever been reported.

Studies documenting the primarily positive effects of psychedelics and the serotonin system have included:

• Winkelman 2021
• Blough et al 2014
• Ott 2013
• Rivier and Lindgren 1972
• Trichter, Klimo and Krippner 2009
• Liechti, Dolder and Schmid 2016
• Dolder et al 2016
• Schmid et al 2015
• Griffiths et al 2019
• Barrett and Griffiths 2018
• Carbonaro, Johnson and Griffiths 2020
• Davis et al 2018
• Griffiths et al 2018
• Nichols 2016
• Arce and Winkleman 2021
• Preller et al 2020
• Daws et al 2022
• Prochazkova et al 2018
• Galani, Patel, and Patel 2010
• Mason et al 2021
• Janiger and Dobkin de Rios 1989
• Schmid and Liechti 2018
• Preller et al 2016
• Holze et al 2021
• Jerome 2007
• Schindler et al 2018
• Rocha et al 2019
• Paulke et al 2013
• Ermakova et al 2022
• Blough et al 2014
• Alper, Beal, and Kaplan 2001

Drug Wars

MATForce and its partner, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, present this information using “war on drugs” terms, including the distribution of a “Drug Wars” video series to schoolteachers.

The federal government’s “war on drugs” rhetoric originated with President Richard Nixon administration.

“Crime, race, hippies, antiwar protestors — Nixon strategists needed a way to draw all of the concerns of his Silent Majority together,” Radley Balko wrote in the study “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” “They decided that the high-profile target of the new administration’s promised anticrime effort would be drug control. Drug use, they thought, was the common denominator among the groups–low-income blacks, the counterculture, and the antiwar movement–against whom Nixon had unified ‘ignored America.’”

Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman spoke to this point in a famous 1994 interview: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

“The White House needed something tangible to sell to the public,” Balko wrote. “If they couldn’t use actual crime data to show their initiatives were working, perhaps they could just create their own impressive statistics by generating lots of arrests and convictions.” The result was “an all-our PR offensive to scare the hell out of the public about crime, and to tie crime to heroin.”