BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
“You don’t feel nothing man, just lights out — you stop breathing and you wake up and either waking up on the earth or not," said recovering drug addict, Rick Ellis.
41-year-old Ellis started using drugs during his early teens while growing up in North Texas.
"You’re always trying to fill a hole and fill a void you can’t fill and that’s what it was like — never being happy, never being satisfied," he said.
Ellis ended up in jail after pawning some stolen items.
“Waking up in jail, waking up in a hospital, waking up in handcuffs, somewhere I don’t know where I’m at — where’s my money where’s my wallet," he said.
The CDC says nearly 108,000 people died from overdoses in 2022 — in Texas, that number is 5,500.
Ellis says he’s seeing it in with his former classmates.
“My next high school reunion is probably going to be at a funeral home or a graveyard man, because everybody in my class is dying left and right," he said.
Rick overdosed three times and had to be revived with Narcan, the opioid-reversing antidote.
Many people overdose in Texas, given the fact Waco is in the middle of the 10th largest interstate in the nation — which happens to be connected to the south.
“Of course, Waco is on I-35 Carter, and obviously that’s the main way from the boarder to the metroplex," said Sheriff Parnell McNamara of McClennan County.
"They go to the west, they go to the east but most of it goes north to the metroplex.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection says nearly 550,000 pounds of drugs were seized from the border last year, but Sheriff McNamara says a lot of narcotics still make it through.
"We’re getting some small amounts of fentanyl, however that number is increasing," he said.
A recent Bell County drug bust, which saw more than $1 million worth of illegal narcotics, seized around $48,000 worth of fentanyl.
But for Ellis, he says he found a new peace after prison.
"If I can be this joyous and happy in prison then how much happier would my life be with everything," Ellis said.
