If you're not riled by the fentanyl threat …

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Fentanyl overdoses claimed the lives of more than 73,000 people in the U.S. in 2022 — 358 of them in Hennepin County. If a foreign power or terrorist group inflicted murders of that scale on our population, people would rise up and demand retribution. Somehow, rather than rushing to the barricades, we seem content to watch the news, shake our heads and wonder whether the 2023 casualty count will be worse.

Here's a troubling thought: It very well could. The number has gone up in each of the past four years.

Here's another: The outrage level among Americans will remain unaccountably subdued. There is a stubborn disconnect between fentanyl's proven, obvious threat to our population and the popular lack of alarm. To any civic leader, and especially to anyone in law enforcement, the difficulty of engaging people about the seriousness of the danger must be deeply frustrating.

The vexation was plainly visible on the face of Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt last week as she stood at a podium and described the problem. She explained that her office had seized enough fentanyl in the first six months of 2023 to kill every person in Hennepin County. "And that's just one agency," she added. "This is something we cannot afford to ignore."

"This isn't a scare campaign," she said. "This is reality."

Witt stood alongside U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., at a news conference held to draw attention to the issue and to authorities' efforts to crack down on drug traffickers. Klobuchar spoke about the bipartisan Cooper Davis Act, which aims to hold social media companies and internet service providers responsible if they knowingly fail to report illegal drug sales on their platforms.

The act bears the name of a teenager in Kansas who died in 2021 after taking half of a counterfeit pill he believed to be Percocet. The pill, which a friend of Davis purchased from a dealer he encountered on Snapchat, turned out to contain fentanyl.

If you're surprised that a small amount of fentanyl can kill a healthy 16-year-old, don't be. The synthetic opioid is devastatingly potent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the drug is 100 times stronger than morphine.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration warns that innocent-looking social media posts, with their cute emojis of blissed-out smiley faces, rocket ships or crystal balls, may actually be coded messages offering drugs for sale. Once a dealer makes contact with a customer, the conversation moves to an encrypted app. Payment happens through another app, and dealers ship the goods to their client.

"No longer confined to street corners and the dark web," says an online DEA publication, "criminal drug networks are now in every home and school in America because of the internet apps on our smartphones." That's the threat that Klobuchar and her colleagues in Congress hope to address with the Cooper Davis Act.

Opponents of the act, including the American Civil Liberties Union, charge that it will erode the privacy of communications and enlist social media companies as police informants. Klobuchar, a former prosecutor, insisted that the act is a necessary step.

"The thought that law enforcement doesn't even have the information about what's going on on these platforms, to me, is absolutely outrageous," she said.

As grim as the fentanyl fight is, there are glimmers of good news. Here's one: The Sheriff's Office is equipping deputies with naloxone, a remedy that can quickly reverse the effects of an overdose. The agency is also offering training to the community in how to administer naloxone. "We meet the community where they're at," Witt said.

Naloxone is widely available over the counter, but it does little good if it's not on hand when someone in your household needs it. Including it in your home's medical kit is a sensible precaution.

Another glimmer of good news is the availability of fentanyl test strips, which can alert users to the presence of the opioid in a drug before it is used. The strips are legal to possess and use in Minnesota, having been removed from the state's list of drug paraphernalia in 2021.

Some of the online literature promoting the test strips suggests that they can help users make informed decisions about whether to use fentanyl. We agree that informed decisions are better decisions, but we don't need a test strip to know that the best decision is to stay away from the stuff.