Amber Govan often can be found inside an unassuming building off 12th Street in Little Rock working with students during after-school programs or consulting federal agencies on community violence intervention through her nonprofit, Carter’s Crew.

helps teens in Central Arkansas who have been in the justice system or live in crime-heavy neighborhoods; it stems from Govan’s personal experience of being considered “at-risk” in her own life.

With $200,000 in settlement funds from the , the nonprofit will add opioid prevention education to its repertoire.

“We want to be a one-stop shop for everything that families need, as much as possible,” Govan said. “Part of our process is that families, not just the teens but the whole family, go through an intake [process] and identify areas they need assistance with. Substance abuse is a major one, right behind mental health.”

More than 108,000 people in the United States died of a drug overdose in 2023, according to preliminary data from the . The same data shows Arkansas had 572 drug overdose deaths in 2023, though the figure could change as the data is finalized.

Carter’s Crew will use the settlement funds to hire a peer recovery specialist, substance abuse educator and a case manager tasked with mitigating risk factors for misuse among teens. Staff will manage a program that will run four 12-week sessions annually, followed by nine months of follow-up for each participant, Govan said.

The program mimics a 12-step program and participants will be referred for outside assistance, such as inpatient services or medication management, when necessary, Govan said.

The settlement funds will also help staff develop an online opioid prevention curriculum, which Govan said will be the first of its kind in Arkansas for the demographic.

Content will include 30-minute videos led by other young people and quizzes to test participants’  knowledge along the way. They will receive certificates upon completion, and Govan said she’s currently working to have court judges accept them as part of the conditions for teens who are completing substance abuse programs.

The program is similar to one used for medical professionals at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Govan said.

Along with creating new programs, Govan also hopes the funding will help break down a stigma among different communities.

“In the Black community, people are afraid to bring up the topic of, ‘I’m struggling with being addicted to prescription pills,’ or whatever it may be,” Govan said. “For us…we want families to understand that there are more people out there who are like you, who need this assistance as well. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just something we need to provide services for.”

Breaking down that stigma will hopefully help people feel more comfortable self identifying and letting any agency or healthcare provider know they need help, Govan said.

Available funding

The funding for Carter’s Crew is part of $26 billion in opioid settlement funds to be distributed nationwide. Of that total, Arkansas is set to receive $216 million over 18 years.

The Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership was created in 2022 using city and county settlement funds. The initiative works to distribute funds to projects aimed at abating the opioid epidemic through prevention, treatment and recovery.

Kirk Lane, director of the initiative, said staff look for several features of a project when considering funding, including heart, innovation, location and prevention efforts. For Carter’s Crew, Lane said he was intrigued by the nonprofit receiving referrals from the juvenile courts.

“We look for the heart first,” he said. “If people are looking at the money as money, that’s not the direction we’re wanting to go.”

Every Arkansas county has at least one active program funded by the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership, according . The announcement from Carter’s Crew increased the funded projects in Pulaski County to nine, joining the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office, the Crisis Stabilization Unit at UAMS, the Natural State Recovery Center and others.

“[Carter’s Crew] was one of the ones that we weeded through,” Lane said. “They were providing something different that the state was doing, was in a county that had a tremendous overdose situation and it was empowering young people that came from strong problem areas.”

Meeting the needs in every Arkansas county is one of Lane’s goals, and he said funding a project in a county that has fewer active programs may be prioritized if it has met the requirements.

Funding opportunities are ongoing, and the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership doesn’t have a deadline for organizations to submit applications. Funding proposals must follow a list of , including evidence-based strategies to abate the opioid epidemic and signatures from the county judge and mayor where the program will take place.

Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde and Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. pledged their support for Carter’s Crew.

After an organization has been awarded funding, the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership conducts regular check-ins over the course of five years to ensure the goals are being met. The initiative collects quarterly data specific to the milestones of each program and completes an annual review.

If money was distributed to an organization and not used toward abating the opioid crisis, that amount is returned to the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership. So far, approximately $1 million has been returned, Lane said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

Four teenagers take turns reading steadily from a teleprompter. Their message is as simple as their videos’ black and white color scheme: With fentanyl, there is no second chance. 

“Look, I’m not here to preach. But you need to be aware of a serious issue,” begins one of now seven public safety announcements written and produced by Arizona’s Tempe Union High School District students. 

In a conversational tone aimed at their Gen Z peers, the students calmly walk through party scenarios and life saving information about fentanyl, the synthetic opioid responsible for over . As little as two grains of salt, approximately 2 mg, are lethal. The size of a pencil tip.

What began last fall as a marketing club project has since become a nationally-recognized, peer to peer called “No Second Chance,” led by four students from two Tempe schools.

Students traversed Arizona and the country, leading local parent workshops and competing in an international competition to quickly spread the word about , commonly laced recreational and counterfeit prescription drugs, and Naloxone or Narcan, the overdose reversal medication. 

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has just — one of two projects in the country to be recognized for their prevention work.

Students behind the campaign were motivated by the silence on the deadly trend that has claimed the lives of thousands of teens throughout their state. 

“There’s this entire world underneath our feet,” Corona del Sol high school senior Jaia Neal told ����Ӱ��. “And yet I don’t hear any of it on social media, or from any of my friends or parents or anything. It’s like, what is happening? How are people not freaking out that so many people are dying from this?”

A sobering released last year revealed that among 10 to 19 year olds, fentanyl-related overdose deaths increased 182% from 2019 to 2021. Two thirds of them were not alone when they overdosed. 

Nearly all deaths were unintentional — of synthetic opioid deaths from 2021 were ruled a suicide. 

Such was the case for Ethan Dukes, 16. His mother, Shari, did not know why her early riser did not wake up one Saturday until the autopsy results came in.

In a way, No Second Chances’ campaign story begins with Ethan, the track athlete with dreams of being a parent and lawyer.

“One pill can kill — I always say one pill does kill. One pill flipped my entire world around,” his mother, lifetime district administrator and local prevention advocate Shari Dukes said. 

He had gone to bed early, by 10:15, after coming home from a party Friday night. At the time, February of 2019, fentanyl was not on her nor the district’s radar. 

Shari told her family’s experience, and frustration over schools’ silence for over two years after Ethan’s death, to the school board and an old colleague, Tempe Union’s social emotional wellness director, Ron Denne Jr. 

“I thought, if I don’t know and I’m so involved, then there’s got to be all these other folks. Your kid can’t go to bed one day and not wake up the next,” Dukes said. 

Denne pitched their community relations team and Corona del Sol’s marketing club advisor — and students took the torch.

No Second Chance has been meeting and presenting with family survivors, and National Guard and DEA drug trafficking teams. Their videos have been screened during video announcements at high schools within the district. Later this basketball season, some will make an appearance on the Phoenix Suns’ jumbotron. 

For those who’ve been doing prevention work for years, the campaign is exactly what’s been missing: how to reach young people effectively.

In the few months since students wrote and recorded PSAs, the landscape has already shifted. The amount of counterfeit pills containing lethal doses has risen from four in ten to seven in ten, the DEA reports. 

Teens are most commonly accessing fentanyl unknowingly from social media or secondhand from friends who have. Looking for prescription drugs, youth find laced, counterfeit Oxycodone, known as blue M30 pills, Percocet or Xanax.

“People don’t know what they don’t know… we want them to understand that there are bad people that are using social media platforms to sell drugs,” said National Guard Sergeant Tommy Morga, who helps lead the Arizona Counter Drug Task Force. 

Compounding concerns, fentanyl is hard to accurately test for. Drugs are mixed unevenly; scraping one side of a pill may yield a false negative. Some THC vapes are impossible to take apart. 

Just six years ago, fentanyl was a rarity outside of medicinal use as an anesthetic particularly for cancer patients. But the drug, 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, has ravaged parts of the country, particularly border areas, like Tempe Union’s , one of the nation’s most populous.

In Texas alone, have sought to authorize Narcan and emergency training for educators and schools. California last month, requiring school safety plans include opioid training. In , advocates are pushing for harm reduction approaches like Tempe Union’s, instead of abstinence or zero tolerance messaging. 

Almost immediately after the PSAs debuted at Tempe Union’s high schools, emails from teachers rolled in: thank you for showing these, my brother died of an overdose; my cousin is addicted. 

Today, 10 doses of Narcan are available at five locations at each high school. Buses are stocked. About 50 students and 250 staff have been trained to administer it, including all nurses, security guards and transportation teams. QR codes to make confidential counselor appointments are posted throughout campuses. The districts’ teachers can access free counseling through Talkspace and longterm support via .��

At Corona del Sol, Neal never crossed paths with Ethan, four years her elder. But while presenting at a DEA teen academy meeting, she revealed her link to him, trading confidence for pained frustration. 

How could they walk the same halls, have the same teachers, and not know Ethan died from fentanyl poisoning?

“How did we not know,” Neal asked, “how close it is to us?”