With overdose deaths increasing exponentially in the first months of 2023 – 40 percent over last year – residents are urging state lawmakers to act quickly to address the problem, with Gov. Gavin Newsom bringing a contingent of the National Guard to parts of San Francisco.
A range of drug-related bills are currently before Sacramento legislators, and it’s hoped many of them will pass, Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine, said in an email response to the Southern California Record. AB 955 would include jail time for selling fentanyl on social media and is now before the Assembly Public Safety Committee, said Petrie-Norris, who introduced AB 955 earlier this year.
“It would align penalties for trafficking fentanyl on a social media platform with long standing penalties for inter-county sale and distribution of fentanyl,” Petrie-Norris said. “This would do a lot to discourage those who hide behind the anonymity of social media platforms to traffic fentanyl.”
Petrie-Norris is advocating a comprehensive approach; the Public Safety Committee Analysis for AB 955 includes arguments in support and opposition.
“As legislators, we need to employ a comprehensive approach that includes more money for drug treatment, stronger enforcement of our laws, and better partnerships with stakeholders – including law enforcement, social media companies, schools, and local governments,” Petrie-Norris said. “I look forward to working with my colleagues as we continue to move towards a multi-layered approach to this crisis.
In Orange County, a Laguna Hills man was recently sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for distributing fentanyl resulting in death, but Petrie-Norris and many other lawmakers have called for tougher penalties at the state level. Sheriff’s investigators seized 15,000 multicolored “rainbow” fentanyl pills in the northern part of the county in January.
“Fentanyl is not just another illicit drug on the market,” Petrie-Norris said. “There have been hundreds of reports of young people dying from a fentanyl overdose after consuming a substance they were misled to believe was something else. It is poison that has been added to almost every street drug available. Just two milligrams of fentanyl, an amount equal to a few grains of salt, is enough to kill a person. As a mother, this scares the hell out of me. As a legislator, I’m going to do everything I can to address this deadly crisis.”
The crisis is also leading FentanylSolutions.org, based in Newport Beach, to push for a statewide ballot measure in 2024 that would include penalties for drug dealers who kill with illicit fentanyl.
“We saw the stats of teens dying from counterfeit pills with fentanyl poisonings and the rates tripling and quadrupling from various years,” Janice M. Celeste, the president & CEO of FentanylSolution.org, told the Record by email. “We knew immediately that this drug epidemic is different from anything we have seen in the past. Then I met the parents, the victims who are left behind, who have lost their children due to fentanyl poisonings and they deserve justice from this heartbreaking crisis.”
As part of Fentanyl Awareness Day last week, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) noted that, “Fentanyl is involved in more deaths of Americans under 50 than any cause of death, including heart disease, cancer, homicide, suicide and other accidents.”
A recent billboard campaign launched in Los Angeles and Orange counties also hopes to focus awareness on fentanyl as a leading cause of death in California.