Goodyear police work with federal officials to educate families about dangers of fentanyl

GOODYEAR, Ariz. (3TV/CBS 5) — For the first time, the Goodyear Police Dept. is working with federal officials to educate you and your family about the dangers of fentanyl. Goodyear police hope the Fentanyl Education Summit on Saturday, Jan. 28 will save lives.

The summit will teach parents what they should watch out for on social media, how to identify fentanyl and use Narcan. The summit will include the Goodyear Fire Dept., Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) program. The DEA says it found more than 22 million pills in Arizona in 2022 alone.

While addressing this can be scary for parents, they hope to make it an approachable subject and are evening offering a workshop for kids as young as 12. Goodyear PD says parents will get hands-on experience on what to look out for when it comes to fentanyl, including sequences of emojis that could be used to sell drugs.

“When you look at the emoji decoder, you see that there’s regular looking emojis that in sequence are really meant to deceive people and lure them in. So in sequence, they will maybe be advertising themselves as a pill seller,” said Cheri Oz, Special Agent in Charge with the DEA’s Phoenix Field Division.

The summit runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 28. Tap/click here for details.

According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, there were 1,579 opioid overdose deaths in Arizona in 2022. The majority, 28.1%, were people between the ages of 15 and 34.

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