Sacramento Report: Fentanyl Overdoses Are Leveling off, but Still Lethal

San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan opened a town hall discussion about fentanyl Wednesday evening with some ostensibly good news. Local fentanyl deaths, which soared from 14 in 2013 to more than 800 by 2021, appear to have stabilized just above the 800 mark.

The fact that local leaders consider it progress just to keep fatalities from climbing above current tragic rates illustrates just how intractable the problem is, and how hard it will be to force fentanyl death numbers back down.

“For every death, they’ve created another 100 highly addicted people who now are looking and searching for illicit fentanyl because they have experienced that feeling and they know that the lower grade, less potent drugs are not enough,” Stephan said.

Stephan was speaking at a town hall presented by state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, who offered an update on efforts to prevent fentanyl trafficking.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that’s 100 times more powerful than prescription morphine. It’s smuggled across the border and sold on streets, or mixed with other chemicals to create counterfeit versions of prescription drugs such as the anti-anxiety medication Xanax or the stimulant Adderall. 

That’s why many politicians and social service officials now refer to fentanyl emergencies as poisonings, because people taking the drug often think they’re getting something else.

The state has received over $2 billion through settlements to opioid lawsuits, Blakespear said at the town hall at MiraCosta College’s campus in Encinitas. It’s using some of that on programs to prevent fentanyl use and provide emergency resources for overdoses and poisonings, including public distribution of the opioid reversal drug Naloxone.

“We have invested heavily in this area, making sure Naloxone is on college campuses and K-12 campuses,” she said.  

California offers fentanyl test strips on college campuses, and requires schools to have plans for dealing with fentanyl emergencies, she said.

San Diego County is also a party to opioid lawsuits, and the board of supervisors created similar plans to spend the $100 million they expect in settlements.

A public safety package in the state legislature introduced legislation to deal with the fentanyl crisis, Blakespear said.

The bills would expand substance use disorder rehabilitation and deploy navigators – guides who help patients through the medical system – in emergency rooms and the criminal justice system. They would increase access to fentanyl testing strips and allow medical providers to dispense a three-day supply of narcotic medication for people starting opioid detox. And they would improve drug testing and medication-assisted treatment for people in the criminal justice system, and offer more treatment options for people leaving jail or prison.

If the fentanyl crisis doesn’t seem catastrophic enough, the town hall’s final speaker, Sal Ruiz, an emergency service coordinator with the county, added a disturbing caveat; new forms of synthetic opioids many times more potent than fentanyl are now being manufactured, and other deadly drugs are being added to the mix. 

One of those is Xylazine. It’s an animal tranquilizer, used to sedate horses, cattle, elephants and rhinos. Known as “tranq” or “zombie drug,” it’s mixed with fentanyl in street drugs, and can depress blood pressure and reduce blood flow to extremities, leading to infected wounds and sepsis. One of the bills in the public safety package, SB 1502, would add Xylazine to a list of restricted drugs in California and outlaw illicit use and trafficking of the drug.

You Can’t Ban Speech but You Can Outlaw ‘Hate Littering’

It’s hard to prevent hateful speech without treading on free speech protections, but Assemblymember Chris Ward, D-San Diego, believes the state can hold people to account for a different violation: hate littering.

On Friday morning he announced a bill, AB 3024, to  impose fines of up to $25,000 for distributing flyers targeting Jewish, LGBTQ and other communities.

The move comes after what officials called an uptick in anti-semitic propaganda, including a barrage of anti-semitic and homophobic flyers scattered through neighborhoods in the San Carlos and Del Cerro neighborhoods last fall.

“These are flyers that are intended to harass and intimidate members of our community and dehumanize them based on their religions, gender or sexual orientation, race or other characteristics,” Ward said.

In September, San Diego City Councilmember Raul Campillo proposed an ordinance outlawing hateful flyers, but on Friday he said he had reconsidered a local approach in favor of statewide legislation.

It’s exceedingly difficult to ban speech, even if it’s offensive or abusive, because of the ironclad protections of the First Amendment. I’ve written about the County Supervisors’ efforts to curtail harassing speech at board meetings and the limitations they faced, following racist slurs and threats.

But Ward thinks he has a solution; his bill wouldn’t introduce a new law regulating speech, but amend an old one. It would add a ban on hateful material to the nearly 50-year-old Ralph Brown Act, which established Californians’ right “to be free from any violence, or intimidation by threat of violence.”

Election Disinformation Bills Aim to Tackle Trolls

We’ve written about the bills that State Sen. Steve Padilla has introduced to get a handle on artificial intelligence technology used by the state government. 

Now he’s trying to restrict AI applications aimed at disrupting government, specifically by bots or accounts spreading election misinformation. 

“Bad actors and foreign bots now have the ability to create fake videos and images and spread lies to millions at the touch of a button,” Padilla said in a statement. 

Campaigns to spread false information fall into two categories. Disinformation is false information deliberately created and shared to cause harm, such as Russian trolls meddling in a U.S. election, Propublica explains. Misinformation is also fake, but the people sharing it don’t realize it’s fraudulent, (think of conspiracy theorists ranting at a public meeting.) Obviously, the two can work synergistically to enhance each other’s messages.

This week Padilla announced three bills aimed at restricting their ability to affect elections.

His bill, SB 1228 would require online platforms to verify users with large audiences or spreading large amounts of AI-generated content, and would identify them as “identity authenticated,” or “identity unauthenticated,” to let users assess the credibility of information and weed out “anonymous trolls and disinformation spreaders.”

Of course, that wouldn’t automatically prevent the spread of falsehoods, but would identify their sources.

Another bill, AB 2839, would keep deepfakes out of campaign ads and independent expenditures close to Election Day, while AB 2655, would indefinitely extend a law that restricts  AI deepfakes close to Election Day.

The Sacramento Report runs every Friday and is part of a partnership with CalMatters. Do you have tips, ideas or questions? Send them to me at deborah@voiceofsandiego.org.