That’s where I think community is powerful, and it’s the only way to defy politics really”

Bill Houston, co-founder of Recovery Road LLC

Booths from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) to the Hastings Police to the Devin J. Norring Foundation lined the high school commons last Saturday for the 2025 Red Ribbon Week community event showcasing community resources for drug addiction, and the dangers of drug use.
Red Ribbon Week was established in 1985 by the National Family Partnership and runs from Oct. 23-31 each year as a time to educate on drug use and encourage participation in drug prevention activities.
Dakota County officials mingled with nonprofits like Thrive! while Naloxone training was given throughout the day in the lecture hall.
And starting the morning after Halloween, the event was largely empty, bereft of the high school students who were meant to be the target audience.
“Is everyone in a sugar coma?” wondered Bridgette Norring, founder of the Devin J. Norring Foundation to the largely empty commons.
While Hastings and Dakota County continue to have high numbers of drug use and overdoses, communication on the dangers of drug use remains difficult.
Many are wary of drug education efforts in schools like the quashed DARE program which leaves many students without any education on anything from the dangers of fentanyl-laced drugs and counterfeit pills to how to administer Naloxone.
“That has always stuck with me because these things could have been prevented,” said Norring, standing before a banner of pictures of those lost to drug poisonings and overdoses, including her son Devin.
Devin J. Norring died in a drug overdose in 2020 from a fake Percocet pill laced with Fentanyl that he bought on Snapchat. He bought the pill for blackout migrates from a cracked molar for which he was unable to get treatment due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
He graduated from Hastings High School in 2019 and hadn’t received drug education there, said Norring.
The event, along with other programming from local nonprofits, has worked to fill that gap in drug education, especially as usage remains high in Hastings.
“Fentanyl cases are going up,” said Jake May, Special Agent in Charge of the Violent Crime Reduction Unit with the BCA.
Even after the spike of drug use during the COVID-19 Pandemic, those numbers have remained high in Dakota County. In particular, Fentanyl use has eclipsed other drugs like heroin and cocaine, usually through counterfeit pills made in Mexico.
“Meth is in the lead, but it [fentanyl] is probably number two now and that’s changed in the last couple of years,” said Becky Willis, a forensic scientist with the BCA.
Willis was showcasing real samples of drug analyses from fake pills recovered by the BCA. Increasingly, these pills will contain more than a dozen ingredients that go far beyond fillers cut with drugs to make them sell for more.
“There’s fentanyl in all these samples, but we see an increase in Nitazenes they call them. They’re synthetic designer opioids.”
Other drugs like ketamine and xylazine are also commonly found in counterfeit pills. These unique recipes and cocktails of drugs can be the signature of one designer meant to market their pills over those of their competitors. This marketing is why pills are dyed bright colors so that they can be specifically referenced, recognized, and purchased.
“I tell people its like alcohol. There’s vodka, there’s bourbon, there’s scotch. Everybody’s got their different thing that they are into,” said May about the marketing of fake pills.
Piercing the stigma of drug use and the broad systems that surround it from prisons to politics to healthcare was a focus of Bill Houston, co-founder of Recovery Road LLC, who was providing the Naloxone training at the event.
“What I see is when we treat them like humans beings, and we give them resources, we have better outcomes,” said Houston.
Specific to administering Naloxone, misconceptions on drug use can get in the way of administering the potentially life-saving drug.
For example, there is a widespread misconception that even touching a doorknob or car door in an area of active drug use can be fatal if there is enough fentanyl on those surfaces.
“There is zero medical evidence of that,” said Houston.
Another widespread fear is what drug users will do once Naloxone is administered to them and they come out of an overdose. While there are reports of drug users being violent after an overdose, it is far more common for users to be scared, sick and confused.
“They wake up and they’re terrified,” said Houston.
These misconceptions can dominate conversations of how to approach addiction over evidence-based methods, which is what Houston discusses with Recovery Road.
Recovery Road’s goal is to do just that: Provide “evidence-based, broad-spectrum harm reduction training that looks at substance use disorder from historical, social, economic, medical, and behavioral perspectives.”
“Addiciton is so complicated. It’s genetic, its behavioral, its environmental, its mental health, its economic health, its stigma against races and classes and genders,” said Houston.
From structural issues like lack of detox beds to misconceptions about drugs and those who use them, addiction can be a hard topic to discuss frankly.
One of the ways to cut through the complication, and through the overarching politics that have emphasized incarceration, is simply through talking with people about the facts.
“That’s where I think community is powerful, and it’s the only way to defy politics really,” said Houston.