SACRAMENTO—With the fentanyl crisis leading to the deaths of more than 500 Californians per week, lawmakers in the California Assembly passed a series of bills on May 25 aimed at preventing overdoses through education, providing more access to opioid reversal medications, and harsher penalties for dealers caught with enough of the drug to kill 500,000 people.
Nine such bills will now be considered by the Senate in the coming weeks.
Throughout the legislative process, some Democrats have remained resistant to increasing penalties to address the crisis, with many characterizing such as a new “War on Drugs.”
Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), who also chairs the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, has led the chorus of legislators voicing the opinion that sending distributors to prison will not alleviate the problem, with repeated references to the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.
Republican lawmakers and some Democrat colleagues, however, have disagreed describing the fentanyl problem as unlike any other.
“There’s no objection to the fact that the situation was mishandled in the 1990s,” Assemblyman Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale) told The Epoch Times. “But this is a whole different problem.”
Law enforcement officials across the state agree.
“Fentanyl is completely different and much worse than what we saw with crack,” Dean Cardinale, detective with the Fresno Police Department, told The Epoch Times. “This is killing kids, and social media on cell phones has made it easy for dealers to prey on children.”
Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control for 2022 shows the problem continues to grow, as an estimated 110,000 people lost their lives across the nation to opioid overdose last year—equaling almost 300 people per day. The number of those deaths directly attributed to fentanyl has not been released yet, but it is believed a majority were caused by the drug.
With deaths skyrocketing and families across California calling for more to be done to stop the crisis, lawmakers authored dozens of fentanyl bills this year, with the majority failing to proceed past the Assembly’s various committees.
The lone proposal related to enforcement sent to the Senate, Assembly Bill 701, was introduced by Assemblyman Carlos Villapuda (D-Stockton) and adds sentencing guidelines for fentanyl to existing laws for heroin and cocaine possession, with a three-year sentencing enhancement for amounts exceeding one kilogram.
Additional years are tacked on to those found guilty of possessing more than four, 10, 20, 40, and 80 kilograms.
The concern with a kilogram threshold for felony penalties is the lethality of the substance, which is often sold in pill form—disguised as legitimate pharmaceutical products—and can easily be kept under the kilogram threshold, according to experts.
“So little fentanyl in weight is so deadly, so they’ll have 2,000 to 3,000 pills in their possession, but they won’t get the weight up to a kilo,” Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno) told The Epoch Times. “This huge loophole exists, and the result of this is we’ve seen an absolute explosion of fentanyl in California.”
“This is a crisis by any definition,” Patterson said. “Yet the committees are saying we care about the dealers more than we care about the victims.”
Other lawmakers echoed the concern and stressed that priorities are misaligned with the interest of communities.
“The distributors are not being talked about, and that’s an oversight because these people don’t respect life,” Lackey, the assemblyman, told The Epoch Times upon walking out of the special hearing in frustration with the alleged lack of balance in the discussions.
Before exiting the meeting, Lackey told the panel that dealers have no incentive to stop selling drugs.
“This is a poison, a very toxic poison, and addiction is not the only problem. Right now, for some reason, we’re afraid to confront that reality, and shame on us,” Lackey told the committee.
Access to Narcan—a nasal spray used to reverse opioid overdoses—is a key priority for lawmakers, with three of the nine approved bills related to the medication. Two concern availability of such on school campuses, and the third would require insurers to pay for the medicine.
Proposals related to education that passed include one designed to inform parents about the dangers of fentanyl and another that would require defendants convicted of opioid-related crimes to attend educational programs as a condition of probation.
Another bill is designed to help college students identify fentanyl by providing test strips on campuses, as the odorless, tasteless synthetic opioid is being cut into fake prescription pills and party drugs—with lethal effects on unwitting users.
One bill with bipartisan support seeks to disrupt the international criminal enterprises that traffic in such drugs with collaborative, inter-agency intelligence gathering operations.
