Migrant Boat Sinks, Wildfire Smoke Returns, Deadly Street Drug

off the coast of Greece is fading.

The fear now is hundreds more are gone.

Is Europe's crackdown on migration making this journey more dangerous?

That's A. Martinez and this is Up First from NPR.

Firefighters in Canada are stretched thin as they fight hundreds of fires in nearly

every Canadian province.

This week, they're getting help from other countries as the smoke from the blazes drifts

south again.

How long will this very early and very intense season of wildfires last?

Stay with us.

We've got the news you need to start your day.

At least 79 people are dead after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized early

Wednesday off the coast of Greece.

And while search operations continue, there's little hope that more survivors will be rescued.

And thousands are protesting in Greece over the handling of this capsized boat and over

European immigration policies.

He just returned from the Greek port city of Kalamata, where many of the survivors were

taken.

Derek, do they know or does anyone know what caused the boat to sink?

It's the subject of an investigation.

What they believe happened is because the vessel was being tracked before it sank, is

that the large number of people in the vessel, on the deck and below deck, possibly moved

to one side and caused the vessel to capsize.

I think maybe as many as 700 people were on board, which would imply that 500 or so could

be dead.

What are the people that survived, what are they saying about what happened?

and politicians and others who have been speaking to the migrants because they have not been

allowed to speak directly to reporters or people there.

But what they've been saying is that, first of all, they're confirming that women and

children were below deck mostly, and most of the men were above deck, or many of the

men were above deck, and they're among the survivors and the bodies recovered.

So the assumption is and the belief is that these people have gone to the bottom with

the ship.

And Leila mentioned earlier thousands of people protesting in Greece over how this was handled.

What is their main concern?

Sometimes Greece has a general election coming up on June 25, so that's part of the reason

for the protest.

But the other reason is that people fear, and not just people, but also aid organizations

and sometimes political parties fear that the crackdown on migration is causing smugglers

to take more dangerous, to take more risks, essentially, so that they take long journeys

on unseaworthy boats, as is in this case.

It was traveling from Libya to Italy, which is a long journey, three days, and two-thirds

of the way through its journey, as it passed through Greece, it capsized, mainly because

it was an unseaworthy boat.

changing politics of migration in Europe affected the types of journeys these people try to

make?

a deal on how to share the burden, if you like, of migrants coming in, because they

all come across the Mediterranean to southern European countries, and then they try to get

to the European countries.

So the crackdown, the inability to figure out how to deal with this has just led to

additional policing and building walls and patrols.

So that has made the journeys across the Mediterranean more dangerous.

of migrants?

Those are the two main things.

Derek, thank you.

Another round of smoke from Canadian wildfires is drifting south, blanketing parts of the

Midwest and headed for the East Coast.

Around 450 wildfires are currently burning across Canada, which is experiencing a particularly

early and intense fire season.

Nate, how close are you to some of those wildfires?

I'm in a city called Val d'Or, which is in the western part of the province, about a

six-hour drive north of Montreal.

And there is a cluster of major wildfires burning a ways north from here, like a couple

more hours.

But only firefighting personnel are being allowed into those areas right now currently.

And despite some rain over the last couple of days, it's kind of unclear when that's

going to change and when those roads will open up.

got to be intense and got to be massive.

I mean, here in Quebec, the amount of land that's burnt is already 10 times what they

would normally see an entire year.

And you know, as you said, we're still really early in the season, only in mid-June.

I was talking to a fire information officer, Melanie Moraine, here yesterday at one of

their bases.

And she said that the scale of this is really complicating things nationally, is because

there are so many fires burning in so many provinces at the exact same time.

And it has limited us being able to help each other within provinces.

And that is one of the reasons why many of the agencies have had to go internationally

for help.

the summer to help out when a place pops off, pretty similar to how we do it in the

U.S.

But right now, with so much fire, they're spread really thin.

I mean, New Zealand, South Africa, France, a bunch of teams came in earlier this week

from Portugal, Spain, and the U.S.

I actually went to meet two U.S.-based hotshot crews at the airport here in Val d'Or yesterday,

you know, hotshots being the creme de la creme of U.S. ground crews.

And for one of the 20-person teams from Helena, Montana, this was already their second Canadian

deployment this year.

I asked their acting superintendent, Tige Stoyanov, what the biggest difference was

fighting fires here versus the U.S., you know, besides the obvious language barrier, which

he said they've been using apps to address.

And he said access in these dense, remote boreal forests has been a real issue.

It's challenging to move around in and challenging to see where the fire is, challenging to see

the quarter mile sometimes.

So they use aviation assets pretty heavily, scoopers and helicopters.

Helicopters are almost like pickup trucks up here.

And scoopers, if you're wondering, are fixed-wing aircraft, airplanes that literally scoop water

from lakes or big bodies of water and then dump them on the fires.

Regrettably, Nate, I'm not wondering.

I watch them work close.

I live in Southern California, so I see them all the time.

Given, though, the remoteness of these fires, is it safe to say they're going to be burning

for a while?

I mean, we're still early in the summer.

I've heard some people say that they expect these fires to burn until it starts snowing,

which to be clear, A, as you know, being in California, that's not necessarily bad.

Fire is a part of a lot of these landscapes.

The concern, though, is that this has happened so intensely so early in the season and that

it's going to continue here for a while.

That's NPR's Nathan Rott in Quebec.

Wear a mask, Nate.

I appreciate it, A.

havoc on people with addiction.

Jessica lives in Newcastle, Delaware.

story.

Brian, how can it be that public health officials and law enforcement don't seem to know where

xylosine is coming from?

addiction overdose epidemic.

Everyone agrees that there's a public health crisis underway, 110,000 deaths last year.

But from the start, the U.S. hasn't done the most basic thing during an epidemic, which

is gather good data, you know, fast, accurate information, intel on what drugs are on the

market, whether it all tends to be siloed in law enforcement agencies and disseminated

really slowly.

I spoke about this with Navarone Descoupta, who runs a lab at the University of North

Carolina that samples street drugs collected all over the U.S.

are either dead or arrested.

to spread.

Now, xylosine is spreading fast and many communities still aren't even testing for the drug.

leaned more toward the drug war, you know, police and law enforcement rather than public

health.

And this angers people grappling with this overdose crisis.

Levi Wardell is in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction himself, and he works now

as a funeral home director in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

And in that role, he helps families who've lost loved ones to drugs.

And he says it's just crazy that officials don't track dangerous drugs and overdoses

the way we track other public health threats.

It was nonstop.

And you saw the map, you saw where places getting red, where hotspots were, all of this

stuff.

Like, why would that not be available for this?

acknowledge the system's still slow and primitive.

Big national solutions like monitoring wastewater for illicit drugs or requiring law enforcement

agencies to report new substances that they're detecting.

Those ideas just haven't gained traction.

How are people on the front lines dealing with this lack of information?

Creative cities in some states are improving their local tracking and their information

sharing systems.

And nonprofit groups are doing the best they can.

I spoke about this with Sam Rivera, who's with On Point.

It's a group that runs a harm reduction clinic in New York City.

checking in with each other.

What's there?

What are you finding here?

What are you finding there?

of real-time national public health data the experts say is needed.

Brian, thanks.

has been indicted by a federal grand jury.

21-year-old Jack Tashira is charged with six counts that each carry up to a decade in prison.

He was arrested in April after being accused of sharing classified information on Ukraine

and other U.S. intelligence in an online chat.

Tashira is in jail while he waits for the start of his trial.

And that's Up First for Friday, June 16th.

I'm A. Martinez.

Up First is produced by David West, Milton Gavada, and Lindsay Toddy.

Our editors are Adam Beirne, Dede Skanky, Andrea DeLeon, and Alice Wolfley.

Our technical director is Zach Coleman, with engineering support from Carly Strange.

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Aisha Roscoe and Scott Simon have all the news.

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