In the spring of 2020, Santa Clarita resident Jaime Puerta suffered a loss most parents are afraid to even think about: His only son Daniel died.
“I got into this fight the very first day when I found my son dead on April 1, 2020, due to fentanyl poisoning,” said Puerta, president of VOID, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of the dangers of fentanyl. “My son went onto Snapchat, ordered what he thought was a blue 30 (mg) oxycodone pill at the very height of the pandemic, and it wasn’t what he thought it was.”
“It was a cloned pill. It was a pill made of fentanyl and binder, and it killed him.”
Federal, local and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department leaders participated in a press conference on Monday at Action Drug Rehabs Center’s office in Santa Clarita to address what they say is a growing local fentanyl crisis that has the Sheriff’s Department seeking to prosecute those responsible for providing the drugs in fatal overdoses.
Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, CEO of Action Drug Rehabs Cary Quashen, Santa Clarita Mayor Laurene Weste, L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, LASD Narcotics Bureau Capt. Brandon Dean, SCV Sheriff’s Station Capt. Justin Diez and Joe Messina, governing board president of the William S. Hart Union High School District, discussed some key points on the issue.
“The fact is that in 2021, the first time in history surpassed the 100,000 mark of drug overdose deaths in the United States, and it is a somber milestone,” Villanueva said. “Those manufacturing products often mixed them with other products such as heroin and methamphetamine, which increases the likelihood of fatal interactions.”
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration defines fentanyl as a “potent synthetic opioid drug.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration outlined its use for medical purposes such as pain relief and anesthetic.
However, the DEA states fentanyl is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin as a pain reliever.
According to Villanueva, there were 1,204 fentanyl-related deaths in the county in 2018, 1,650 deaths in 2019, and 2,425 deaths in 2020. The number of fentanyl-related deaths in 2021 is not complete data, but the county has already reached the same amount as in 2020 by the third quarter last year, Villanueva added.
Local deputies have reported 21 fentanyl-related deaths this year in the SCV, Villanueva added.
In response to the number of increasing fentanyl-related incidents and deaths, Villanueva said LASD created an Overdose Response Task Force in July. The task force will investigate and identify sellers of controlled substances and determine their criminal culpability in the death of an individual.
According to Dean, the Sheriff’s Department has always investigated narcotics-related deaths. However, it was a difficult task because deputies would “not only go after these large dealers selling 10,000 fentanyl pills, hundreds of pounds of meth, and then also dealing with a death investigation.”
Previously, drug-related deaths were not treated as homicide investigations, he added.
“We decided to take that off them,” Dean said. “We created a specific team of investigators that are highly trained, who’ve been to our homicide investigation schools with the department, and we’re actually treating these now as death investigations.”
This new task force is comprised of members from LASD’s Narcotics Bureau, Operation Safe Street Bureau, Major Crimes, Special Victims, Fraud and Cyber Crimes and the Homicide Bureau.
“The ultimate goal is to present these cases and secure conditions on those individuals,” Dean said.
Diez described the 21 overdose deaths in the SCV as “21 too many.” He added that there have also been 150 calls for service in the last eight months regarding overdoses, and another 700 people were arrested on suspicion of narcotics-related offenses in the same time frame.
“Station deputies and patrol have used Narcan over a dozen times to save lives, just in the past year,” Diez said. “Can you imagine if those deputies weren’t equipped with Narcan.”
A takeaway leaders wanted to share with the community was that: “The dangers of fentanyl are in the palms of your children.”
“There’s a crisis that’s happening in America, and it’s now hitting Santa Clarita,” Weste said. “The DEA estimates 25% of all street drugs are laced with fentanyl. I have seen the physical effects on our community and families.”
“This is the deadliest drug that has ever hit our nation, and we have to talk about it. We have to talk about it loudly, and we have to take action.”
Messina added that it’s truly a community effort involving the City Council, the Sheriff’s Department and the school board in protecting and helping SCV residents.
In addition to LASD’s response to the growing fentanyl crisis, Garcia said there’s a funding element to potentially solving this issue.
“There’s something that we’re doing from a funding perspective to help local communities. I know states and counties are doing the same,” Garcia said. “We had roughly $4.2 billion in our Health and Human Services Bill these last couple months ago.”
He believes the money is there and it’s helped mitigate the effects of the fentanyl crisis. However, he thinks there should be a stronger presence at the U.S.-Mexican border to prevent fentanyl and other narcotics from entering the nation.
“As long as this drug keeps getting imported at the same rates that it is, it’s going to go parabolic, death rates as well,” Garcia said.
But at home the most important way to combat fentanyl-related deaths, especially in children, is to engage with them and watch what they are doing on social media, according to Puerta.
“If you want to know why we’re having such an issue with children and drugs, and bad decisions, is because they’re connecting to their friends, not their parents, and the entire kill chain for fentanyl is in their phone,” he said. “We can teach our kids to look left and right before they cross the street, to not talk to strangers, but literally everything that can kill them, when it comes to fentanyl, is sitting right there in this little device.”
