The 33-Year-Old Architect of the Region’s Fentanyl Response

Becky Devine was losing hope by the middle of 2017. She was working as a bank teller while earning her master’s in social work at UT Arlington, so tired that she’d doze off if she paused for a moment, her textbook in her hand. She applied to dozens of nonprofits, and at 25 years old faced a familiar anxiety about what would come next. So when an unknown number left her a voicemail one spring morning, she rushed out from work during a lunch break to call back.

“Why do you keep applying to this job?” said the woman on the other end of the phone.

The blunt question—Devine had, after all, only applied twice—came from the program director of what was then the Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, a Dallas nonprofit in search of something called a “coalition coordinator.” Devine didn’t know what the title meant, but she was desperate. “I have passion,” she said, sputtering before insisting she could do the listed tasks. “You’re not qualified,” the director said, but told her she could come in for an interview.

Devine had her foot in the door.

Eight years later, Devine—who until recently went by her maiden name, Tinney—is at the center of the local fight to curb the fentanyl epidemic, one of the largest and most challenging public health crises to reach North Texas. First responders help save lives immediately after an overdose. Police handle enforcement to stop, or at least slow, the dealers. Devine occupies the middle of this timeline, the point in which individuals in the throes of addiction need to be presented with help and information.

The 33-year-old, now a director at the Fort Worth-based Recovery Resource Council, helped stand up overdose response teams across the region. Within 72 hours of an overdose, these two-person units are deployed to the survivor’s home with the life-saving medication naloxone, or Narcan, their business cards, and brochures detailing services for substance use disorders.

At its peak in 2022, the synthetic opioid killed an average of five Texans a day. It did not discriminate by income or race or gender. But in the years since, fentanyl-related deaths and overdoses are trending downward. The state tracks deaths from the drug over 12 month periods to account for seasonal changes and other variables. Fentanyl-related fatalities in Texas fell 30 percent for the yearlong period ending in February 2025 compared to the same stretch the prior year, according to the state’s health dashboard. Dallas County data also show a general decline. The county reported 280 fentanyl-related deaths in 2023, compared with 231 in 2024, a 17.5 percent decrease. This year’s tally is at 118. (The 2025 total is through Sept. 9 and is expected to increase as death certificates are finalized.)

The drop-off aligns with the expansion of prevention and enforcement programs that were only crumbs of ideas three years ago. Devine’s overdose response teams now operate in the cities of Dallas, Denton, and McKinney, as well as in towns across Tarrant and Hunt counties. Dallas County Health and Human Services was awarded an $11.5 million federal grant in 2023 to support an overdose response team and other programs aimed at combating the epidemic. Four vending machines carrying free “harm reduction” materials, including Narcan and drug disposal kits, will be placed around Dallas County this month. A few Dallas Fire-Rescue paramedics will soon carry buprenorphine, a drug used to minimize withdrawal symptoms and cravings.

“We've really come a long way from, ‘Hey, we have a problem,’ to now,” says Scott Clumpner, a Dallas Fire-Rescue deputy chief who oversees the city’s overdose response team. “We have outreach going on and it’s a collaboration between nonprofits, [the] county health department, Parkland, and ourselves—and so we have seen a leveling off in the amount of opioid overdoses we’re responding to.”

At the heart of this circulatory system is Devine, a bubbly brunette whose personal history attracted her to this work. She grew up in Houghton Lake, Mich., a northern rural town of a few thousand. When her mother was pregnant with her, her father was hospitalized in a coma following a motorcycle accident. He suffered a head injury and collapsed lungs. As her father regained consciousness and started physical therapy, doctors prescribed pain medication. This was a turning point for the family. Her parents began to misuse prescription drugs and went through spurts of break-ups and reconciliations, Devine says. Trauma from the accident festered. When she turned 10, her parents separated and remained apart for a decade.

Devine says she spent her high school years in survival mode. She was unsupervised and wanted to escape. After she graduated, she did. She moved a month later to Fort Worth for an accelerated business program at Northwood University, a private school four states and 1,250 miles from home. She avoided drugs and alcohol in Michigan, which she today calls a miracle. She promised herself she’d do all she could to not repeat what she lived and witnessed as a child.

But as she neared graduation at Northwood, she realized business wasn’t for her. She felt directionless. She cold-called development leaders, and after visiting a museum, became enamored with art and theater. She interned for an art gallery in Dallas’ Design District and in the marketing department of what is now Broadway Dallas. “ I was still just trying to kind of meander my way around and go anywhere I would fit in,” she says. But internships are not full-time jobs, so she landed an administrative gig at the Methodist Health System Foundation in North Oak Cliff. She enjoyed helping others, but still felt stagnant. She needed a reset. She became a bank teller and enrolled in UT Arlington, where she discovered research about mental health and substance use. It resonated.

When the Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse took a chance on her after that 2017 call, Devine felt the resolve she’d been searching for. “ I want to be to a kid what I wished I had in my life growing up,” she says. “I wanted an adult to be positive for me and be there. Nobody was coming to save me.” That passion distinguished her to leadership at the Dallas nonprofit, which later merged with a similar-minded Fort Worth organization to become the Recovery Resource Council. It grew from about 30 staffers when Devine was hired to more than 100 employees who provide mental and behavioral health services in 20 counties.

Devine was promoted to the organization’s director of community engagement in 2019. On the brink of the COVID-19 pandemic, she attended a conference in Maryland where she learned about an overdose response team in Chillicothe, Ohio, a town of about 22,000 hit hard by the opioid epidemic. The teams delivered Narcan to the homes of overdose survivors. Devine was inspired. “If a program like that existed during my childhood,” she thought, “maybe somebody would've knocked on our door.” Maybe the intervention could’ve helped her family.

“I’m obsessed with this idea, and I find out that there’s really not anything happening in this space in Texas,” she recalls. Her excitement grew after the city of Dallas launched a similar concept called RIGHT Care, teams made up of a police officer, paramedic, social worker, and clinician that respond to emergency mental health calls. She attended a panel to learn about the initiative, and by luck or happenstance, Dallas Fire-Rescue officials sat next to her. “I just start gushing,” she says. They confirmed the department didn’t have a specialized response for substance abuse. Their partnership began soon after.

Dallas Fire-Rescue Lt. Clinton Page says the agency didn’t have a regular treatment option for substance use disorder. The partnership with the Recovery Resource Council, he says, “changed everything,” adding officials have “learned a lot” over the last decade about programs that save taxpayer dollars and free up first responders. “All this is diversion,” Page says, “because we can't keep throwing Dallas fire and Dallas police resources at everything that comes across 911.” 

Devine was suddenly writing grant proposals, filing public records requests to gather overdose data, and presenting to the region’s top law enforcement leaders. “I thought I was going to die of nervousness,” she says. She interviewed San Antonio officials to learn about a similar overdose response program there. She pitched the idea to North Texas’ largest cities. The opioid epidemic had not yet struck Texas like the Midwest and Appalachia, but it was closing in. Deaths were increasing in neighboring states such as New Mexico and Oklahoma. “It's not here yet,” she told North Texas agencies, “but it's coming.”

The Recovery Resource Council was awarded nearly $2 million through a 2019 UT Health San Antonio School of Nursing grant. The money allowed the nonprofit to expand the operation across North Texas and pay municipalities to dedicate paramedics to the effort. “It was really kind of a no-lose proposal for them,” Devine says. The red tape of city governance slowed proposals in cities including Dallas, but at the end of 2021, her first team—a paramedic and a peer support specialist who got sober 13 years ago—ventured out in Tarrant County through MedStar, a private healthcare company that did not require navigating layers of bureaucratic approval.

After about a week, the peer specialist called her. “Somebody just asked for help,” he said. “What do we do?” By that point, those who answered their doors had accepted Narcan, pamphlets, and business cards. This was the first time someone opened their door and asked for help getting treatment. The peer specialist called the Recovery Resource Council’s information center to ask about available services. “We were building the plane as we were flying it,” Devine says. “The pressure was on.”

That plane got in the air just as fentanyl began to make its mark on schools, churches, and homes. The synthetic opioid, often pressed into counterfeit pills purporting to be different drugs, is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Public awareness grew locally in 2022 and 2023, when juvenile dealers sold fake pills cut with fentanyl to North Texas classmates. Four Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD students died and at least seven others were hospitalized during a wave of fentanyl overdoses in suburban schools. 

This new drug changed the game, Devine says. Her teams began visiting addresses where ambulances had been called within the previous three days because of an overdose. They drove into gated neighborhoods with million-dollar homes one day and subsidized apartment buildings and homeless encampments the next. “The only thing it takes to have us show up on your doorstep is that you survived an overdose,” Devine says. “Nothing else matters. Your socioeconomic status doesn't matter, your income, [whether] you have insurance, what neighborhoods you live in; none of that matters.”

As of June, her teams have attempted 6,054 visits. Of those, they’ve served 1,693 people, which includes everything from handing out Narcan to helping usher people into treatment.

The city of Dallas’ team launched in January 2023, followed by Plano and Denton. (Plano’s program was paused this year because of federal funding cuts, Devine says.) Hunt County came next in November 2024, and the city of McKinney joined in February. Devine anticipates expanding Dallas County coverage in the next month, and is in talks with other Texas counties. 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach, so the teams adjust on the fly. A social worker partners with Devine’s teams to help address compounding issues like housing, food insecurity, unemployment, and a lack of mental health medication. “Four years and five counties and six teams in,” Devine says, “there’s still scenarios we run into that we’ve never experienced.” 

She describes the work as “a beatdown” that requires resilience. Some days teams knock on 10 doors each and no one answers. Other times, the staff has moved heaven and earth to get clients into treatment—just for the person to walk out three days later. There are always more people in need than they can reach. Devine tells her teams to “fill their cups” with those they are able to help. Shepherding even one person into sobriety can reset generational trauma, she says, and heal family circles. She remembers a client who turned the team away seven times. On the eighth attempt, that person finally agreed to residential treatment.

“We never know which moment will be the moment. If we give up after 10 failed attempts, what if the eleventh was the one that changed everything?” she says. “That’s why we keep showing up.”

After finally getting the plane to cruising altitude—expanding into new cities, collaborating with additional partners, standardizing the program, actually reducing deaths—Devine learned of another emergency. The Trump administration slashed COVID-19 relief funds, cutting the nonprofit’s budget by about $730,000. It had enough money to pay its own staffers but not enough to reimburse emergency medical service expenses. 

She dreaded telling her public partners; getting paramedics involved was crucial to the program’s success. But the results had become self-evident. Each municipality saw the value of what Devine had helped build. All but Plano have pledged to fund the paramedics on their own, and the northern suburb is trying to find money in its budget.

Dr. Philip Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, says he believes the effort is making a significant impact in tandem with other prevention programs. In the first half of the year, the city of Dallas’ overdose response team made 697 home visits. Not everyone answered; the team served 102 people during that span. “The information and awareness getting out there and these activities, getting the naloxone out there,” he says, “I mean, all of these efforts are helping.”

Now the special projects director at the Recovery Resource Council, Devine can’t say whether an overdose response team would have made a difference in her own life when she was a child in Michigan. “Maybe, maybe not,” she says, “ but that’s just it, right? It's that there’s always that possibility that this could be the thing that changes that family.” Sometimes, she adds, all it takes is a knock on the door to break the feeling of normalcy and spur a family to have a hard conversation with a loved one, even if they don’t immediately accept what the strangers on their front step are offering.

“Rock bottom looks different for everybody,” Devine says, “and sometimes you hit rock bottom multiple times before you are ready to change. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing, right? A hand extended out at the right time and the right place and the right moment for you to be ready to take it.”

Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. [email protected].

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