On a recent afternoon along a stretch of Beach Boulevard in Garden Grove, California, a man winced before slumping over at a bus stop as he tightly gripped a blowtorch he had used to heat fentanyl.
Another man next to him had already passed out after doing the drug in broad daylight just feet away from passing traffic.
“[T]he solution in Sacramento is not to go after drug dealers and put them in prison,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said at a recent town hall meeting on fentanyl in nearby Laguna Niguel, California. “[California’s] Legislature keeps doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting it do something different, but nothing changes.”
Recently, California has passed new laws decriminalizing drug use. Meanwhile, the state continues to have the highest amount of drug overdose deaths in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Newport Beach, one advocacy group with former state Sen. Patricia Bates (R-Laguna Niguel) on the board—FentanylSolution.org—is raising awareness about the dangers of fentanyl and advocating for stricter penalties for drug dealers who sell it.
“We want to let the legislators, who voted against every form of penalty for these drug dealers, know that we are holding them accountable,” Janice M. Celeste, President & CEO of the group said in a recent press release. “We believe that drug dealers who sell fentanyl and murder their customers must pay the price for their actions.”
In Orange County alone, fentanyl deaths have increased by over 1,000 percent within the last five years, according to law enforcement officials.
Last week, the organization launched a $2.2 million “poll-to-prop” initiative to combat California’s epidemic.
The organization has partnered with McNally Temple Associates, a Sacramento-based political consulting firm to conduct the polling in the hope of drafting a 2024 statewide ballot initiative.
“The poll-to-prop initiative is a crucial step in our efforts to raise awareness about the need for stricter penalties for these criminals,” Celeste said.
Board member Amy Neville lost her 14-year-old son Alex to fentanyl poisoning in 2020 after he unknowingly consumed the substance in a fake prescription pill he purchased from a drug dealer using the popular social media app, Snapchat.
“The last time I saw him alive was about 9 p.m. in the evening. … He was gone the following morning,” she said at the Laguna Niguel town hall meeting. “There’s such an ease to selling drugs off Snapchat and other social media when these dealers become friends with our kids and take them on a grooming process.”
Neville has also started a non-profit named after her son The Alexander Neville Foundation, which educates students and the public on fentanyl and the dangers of illicit prescription pills.
“When kids have issues, their friends can easily give them a pill to handle the issue,” she said. “You do not know how many times that pill ended up being fentanyl.”
According to a 2022 report from the Orange County Coroner, there were 717 fentanyl-related deaths in the county, including children who unknowingly consumed it in fake prescription pills.
Both the Orange County Coroner-Sheriff Don Barnes and District Attorney Spitzer have said many fentanyl deaths are preventable by implementing stricter punishment for dealers, but such bills have failed to pass in the state Legislature.
“Crimes that were once a felony are now a misdemeanor in this state,” Barnes said during the town hall meeting. “There’s a proliferation of recurring drug use.”
Fentanyl is now the number one killer of adults in the nation for ages 18 to 45 years old.
