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She believes the city’s decision not to charge dealers has allowed open-air narcotics markets to flourish in certain neighborhoods and have enabled drug use, rather than encouraged people dealing with addiction to get help. Test kits can help.īerlinn’s son, Corey, 30, has used heroin and fentanyl for seven years on the streets of San Francisco.

#SNAPCHAT ITS ROOT OUT DEALERS HOW TO#

One critic of California’s progressive policies is Jacqui Berlinn, a legal processing clerk in the East Bay who started Mothers Against Drug Deaths - a name she chose as an homage to the achievements of Mothers Against Drunk Driving founder Candace Lightner, a Fair Oaks homemaker whose 13-year-old daughter was killed in 1980 by a driver under the influence.Ĭalifornia With overdose deaths rising, here’s how to test drugs for fentanylįentanyl is often mixed with other drugs (including heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine) to increase potency, but it can be deadly. Now, the family-run organizations that have sprung from California’s fentanyl crisis have begun cooperating with one another.Ī network of parent groups and other activists that calls itself the California Peace Coalition was formed recently by Michael Shellenberger, a Berkeley author and activist running for governor as an independent. Since the earliest days of the opioid epidemic, the families of people dealing with addiction and of those who have died from overdoses have supported one another in church basements and on online platforms from Florida to Oregon. Pressure from parent groups has also spurred Santa Monica-based Snapchat to deploy tools to detect drug sales and restrictions designed to make it harder for dealers to target minors. With the help of two executives at Google who lost sons to pills laced with fentanyl, Ternan convinced Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms to donate ad space to warnings about counterfeit drugs. The deaths have included a Stanford University sophomore and a 12-year-old girl in San Jose. In 2021, 106 people died from fentanyl overdoses in Santa Clara County - up from 11 in 2018. Ternan discovered a string of similar deaths in other Silicon Valley communities. First responders said the strapping 6-foot-2-inch, 235-pound college senior died within a half-hour of swallowing the counterfeit pill. Relatives determined from messages on Charlie’s phone that he had intended to buy Percocet, a prescription painkiller he had taken after back surgery two years earlier. Ternan knew almost nothing about fentanyl when his 22-year-old son, Charlie, died in his fraternity house bedroom at Santa Clara University a few weeks before he was scheduled to graduate in spring 2020. In many cases, the overdose victims are straight-A students or star athletes from the suburbs, giving rise to an army of educated, engaged parents who are challenging the silence and stigma surrounding drug deaths.

The drug first hit the East Coast nearly a decade ago, largely through the heroin supply, but Mexican drug cartels have since introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals laced with the highly addictive powder into California and Arizona to hook new customers. Often, they involved high school or college students who thought they were taking Oxycontin or Xanax purchased on social media but were actually ingesting pills containing fentanyl. Many parents mobilized after a wave of deaths that began in 2019. But a public defender said such moves are outside the scope of the law. Some prosecutors are pursuing murder charges for dealers linked to fentanyl deaths. “This problem is going to be solved by the grass-roots efforts of affected families,” said Ed Ternan, who runs the Pasadena-based group Song for Charlie, which focuses on educating youths about the dangers of counterfeit pills.Ĭalifornia Prosecutors want to charge fentanyl drug dealers with murder, sparking legal battle They erect billboards blaming politicians for the drug crisis and stage “die-in” protests against open-air drug markets in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach and San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.

The groups press state lawmakers for stricter penalties for dealers and lobby technology companies to allow parents to monitor their kids’ communications on social media. One group, Mothers Against Drug Deaths, pays homage to MADD by borrowing its acronym.

Modeled after Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which sparked a movement in the 1980s, organizations such as Victims of Illicit Drugs and the Alexander Neville Foundation seek to raise public awareness and influence drug policy. Capelouto’s organization is part of a nationwide movement of parents-turned-activists fighting the increasingly deadly drug crisis - and they are challenging California’s doctrine that drugs should be treated as a health problem rather than prosecuted by the criminal justice system.

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