Major League Baseball (MLB) player Tyler Skaggs died several years ago. He was found in his team hotel room in Texas, choking on his vomit, on July 1, 2019 (Wagner, 2021). The main cause of death was ruled as “an intoxication from the substances,” including fentanyl, oxycodone, and alcohol (Wagner, 2021, para. 8). Fentanyl is a fast-acting opioid, which is 50-100 times more powerful than morphine and 30-50 times than heroin (Han et al., 2019). This opioid drug is frequently used in medicine to manage severe pain in cancer patients and perioperative pain. However, it is also used outside of clinical settings and often leads to fatal overdoses. The case of Tyler Skaggs serves as a reminder of the problem that is crucial in the United States nowadays – the opioid crisis.
The opioid-related deaths are not new, and one of their reasons is illicitly produced and distributed opioid drugs. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is responsible for reducing “the Aggregate Production Quota (APQ) of opioids each year since 2017” (Schatman & Wegrzyn, 2020, p. 2629). According to the DEA’s 2020 report, the “total domestic opioid production has decreased by 53% since 2016” (Schatman & Wegrzyn, 2020, p. 2629). Still, the number of deaths from opioid overdose continues to increase, and Skaggs’s death is one such case. Since the baseball player did not receive the drugs from his doctor, the DEA began to investigate his overdose-death in general and the source of the drugs in particular.
The DEA is responsible for the health and safety of American communities and neighborhoods. That is why the organization is involved in investigating Skaggs’s death. The main goals of the DEA are to identify and affect the sources of illicit drugs and reduce drug-related violence (DEA, 2021). Moreover, it aims to assist and contribute to local drug use prevention activities and bring justice to the families of persons who died because they did not know what drugs they used (Nishida, 2021). Thus, the DEA created the Overdose Justice Task Force to investigate opioid-related deaths, most of which were caused by fentanyl (Nishida, 2021). Since Skaggs’s death was also caused by fentanyl overdose, the DEA interfered with his case and started its investigation.
When it is clear why the DEA is involved in Skaggs’s death investigation, it is still unclear how it is involved. Thus, federal law enforcement agents interviewed other team members, friends, and relatives of the victim, trying to discover how the man obtained the drug. The investigation showed that fentanyl was detected everywhere, “even in marijuana” (Quinn, 2019, para. 5). Thus, the DEA started its cooperation with law enforcement to reduce domestic opioid production and drug-related deaths. The organization’s investigation led to Eric Kay, who worked in the communication department of the baseball team where Skaggs played. The man was charged for supplying Skaggs counterfeit drugs with fentanyl that caused the player’s death and distributing oxycodone and fentanyl since at least 2017 (Castillo, 2022). Although Kay’s fault has not yet been proven, the DEA’s contribution to this investigation is significant.
Skaggs’s death is a reminder of the existing opioid crisis in the U.S. This case demonstrates that the opioid epidemic is a societal problem associated with governmental blindness and unwillingness or inability to solve this issue. According to Fischer et al. (2020), illicitly produced and distributed synthetic opioid drugs, including fentanyl, have appeared during the last five years. They are distributed as counterfeit prescriptions along with other medications. Therefore, neither consumers nor law enforcement can detect the source of such drugs. For this reason, the number of opioid-related deaths in the United States has increased by 300% between 2013 and 2017 (Fischer et al., 2020). Most opioid-related deaths involve fentanyl, which is why the current drug crisis is identified as a “fentanyl epidemic” (Fischer et al., 2020, p. 2). The U.S. government needs to understand the supply process and reveal illicit drug markets and producers to address this problem.
One can see that the opioid crisis is a societal problem, and the whole society should try to address it. Thus, in Skaggs’s case, friends and relatives did not report any drug-related issues before Tyler’s death. Moreover, MLB had never tested its players on opioid use before that case, and it agreed to add this testing to the drug policy only five months after Skaggs’s death (Castillo, 2022). The questions arise: why did not MLB address this issue earlier? Is it possible that no one noticed that Skaggs suffered from pain and needed painkillers? Further research is required in order to answer these questions and find the guilty for Skaggs’s death.
The opioid epidemic is a national problem that needs to be managed immediately. Nowadays, people have open access to prescribed and illicit opioid products, leading to misuse, overdose, and even death. If the DEA wants to change the situation, it should cooperate with law enforcement and offer stricter regulations and control of opioid drug prescriptions. Moreover, state and federal government agencies and health organizations should also address this epidemic, improving the existing rules and policies and emphasizing pain prevention, not just treatment. Finally, synthetic illegal opioid drugs entering the United States from outside markets should be eliminated.