Special Episode: A Conference on Crime, Panel 2 – The Fentanyl Crisis

CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: This Special Episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live at Capitol Weekly’s Conference on Crime, which was held in Sacramento on Thursday, March 21, 2024

 This is PANEL 2 – THE FENTANYL CRISIS

Panelists: Sen. Dave Cortese; Sen. Kelly Seyarto; Gretchen Burns Bergman, Parents for Addiction Treatment & Healing; Lt. Diane Goldstein (Ret.), Law Enforcement Action Partnership

Moderated by Ashley Zavala, KCRA 3

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

ASHLEY ZAVALA:  Hello, everyone. Welcome to our panel on illicit fentanyl, which we should note, because as some of the panelists and I were discussing earlier, there is obviously a legal use to it, but today we are hyper focused on the Fentanyl Crisis, the illegal one.

So first, I just wanted to open it up to our panelists to introduce themselves in the most concise way possible – maybe one or two sentences. So, Lieutenant, let’s start with you over there.

Lt. DIANE GOLDSTEIN: Sure. My name is Diane Goldstein and I’m a retired lieutenant from Redondo Beach Police Department, California. Yes. The famous pizza case, I’ll raise my hand. I was working on the pier the day that happened. And I was part of that. But currently I am the Executive Director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a nonprofit working to uplift great strategic policing and include the communities in a co-shared space, the responsibility of public safety.

AZ: And. All right, Gretchen.

GRETCHEN BURNS BERGMAN: And I’m Gretchen Burns Bergman, And I’m co-founder, executive director of A New Path – that’s Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing. We’ve been working for 25 years now to reduce the stigma associated with substance use disorders. And we advocate for their justice restorative policies. I’m also, since 2009, the lead organizer of Moms United to end the War on Drugs. It’s a campaign, a collaborative campaign, across the country… and it’s even international now… of advocacy led by moms, led by parents, for sane, humane drug policies, destigmatizing policies, and decriminalizing policies. And I must say that I am the mother of two sons who struggled for decades with addiction to heroin, which brought me to this work. They’re now in long term recovery and working with me.

AZ: Hello, Senator Seyarto.

SENATOR KELLY SEYARTO: Hi, everybody. Thank you. I’m Kelly Seyarto. I’m Senator of the 32nd Senate District down in Riverside. Prior to that, I was a 35 year fire service professional, of which ten of those years were spent in communities that were heavily impacted by drug use. And I spent many years correcting overdoses in the field. And at the time, it was heroin. But this is a little different. So anyway, I’m anxious to be able to talk about this and with some of the solutions that we can come up with.

AZ: Hello, Senator Cortese.

SENATOR DAVE CORTESE: Hi. Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m Dave Cortese, Senate District 15, which is predominantly San Jose and a few small cities in Santa Clara County. I did serve a local government for a couple of decades prior to this. I’m a business person and an attorney. And I did practice criminal law for six years back in the day. So I’m happy to be here to participate. Thank you.

“The number one cause of death for those under age of 25 in California… was fentanyl” – Sen. Dave Cortese

AZ: Well, thank you all for being here. So let’s jump right in. So with fentanyl being a leading factor in overdoses not just in the United States, but of course here in California, what is or what should be the state’s role in this crisis? And we’ll start with you, Senator Cortese.

DC: Great. Thank you. You know, obviously, the epidemic that we’re seeing calls for action… I don’t think in any one single area. In my own efforts thus far, you know, I was able to get passed with the support of colleagues in the legislature, of course, and the governor SB 10 last year, which really comes in more on the prevention and response side by going back to an old statute that requires school safety plans and all of our public schools, and embedding in those school safety plans that prevention and response requirement, along with training of all public school employees, regardless if they’re teachers or classified employees and so forth. So that is happening now.

Conference on Crime, Panel 2: The Fentanyl Crisis. LGretchen Burns Bergman, Parents for Addiction Treatment & Healing. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly

Those folks, by March of every year, have to begin submitting their school safety plans for the year. That’s one side of it. I’ve said all along, and I said frankly during the the press conferences on that bill, that that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to try to and, you know, [garbled] the incoming substance itself, which obviously is being pushed by folks that are typically not high school students or their peers. We’re finding that those were the victims. And what prompted that bill was a San Jose Mercury News investigative report that documented very clearly that the number one cause of death for those under age of 25 in California, when we introduced that bill, was fentanyl. But we need to cut it off at the source. And, you know, I’m glad we’re talking about some other areas where we might need to legislate going forward.

I do support the package that Pro Tem McGuire unveiled recently. I was part of the leadership team to unveil that. I don’t at the moment have a bill in that package on the fentanyl side. Obviously that deals with retail.. that package deals with retail crime as well. But we do expect to have a fentanyl bill in that package going forward.

AZ: And we’ll just go down the line. So, Senator Seyarto….

KS: Well, thank you very much. And you know, the state’s role in any crisis is to gather information and then figure out a strategic plan, including all the people that should be involved in the various aspects. And fentanyl has a lot of various aspects to it. The incoming flow, the distribution, but also educating people that are not addicts. And then there’s the treatment part of it also that needs to be dealt with.

If we don’t have a strategic plan, what we get is a very fractured approach. And when we get fractured approaches we don’t know what to fund or how much to fund it, and we don’t know what needs to be done. And so that’s why I introduced last year, SB 19, which was forming a Fentanyl Task Force statewide to be able to get everybody to the table so that they can come up with creative and strategic ideas in each of those different categories, so that the state will know where we need the funding.

Because what we can’t have is to allow this to go unfettered because it is a drug like no other. It is highly addictive. Once you’re on and you’re addicted to it, it is very, very difficult to get off. So that needs a different treatment approach. But there’s also an emergency approach when you’re out on the street.

“We can’t waste time. This is a crisis. We can’t waste time, resources and energy on stiffer penalties and more criminalization. Historically, that doesn’t work, because we’re dealing with a public health problem” – Gretchen Burns Bergman

And I’ve seen some of those approaches work well when I was a paramedic. But we need help. There’s not a paramedic on scene for every person that ODs. So we have had some legislation that’s passed, but again, it’s all piecemeal. And then at the same time you know, we’re cutting the budget that helps deal with this. And we can’t do that. This has to be a priority in California. So the state’s role is to coordinate a strategic plan and then ensure that there is funding to carry out that strategic plan and reverse this, this epidemic because that’s what it is. And like I said, it needs to be treated a little different because it is different than any of the other drug crises we have dealt with in the past.

GBB: Thank you. I think that California is doing a lot, but there’s so much more that we need to do. And specifically, we really need to concentrate on the demand for drugs and not the supply of drugs.

We need greater access to harm reduction strategies, and that includes a whole range of things, including syringe exchange, Narcan distribution, which we’re doing a lot in Southern California. But we’re still not reaching everyone despite, you know, the magnitude of our program.

We need fentanyl test strips. And I have to say that the the state is paying for our naloxone now and just recently our fentanyl test strips. But there’s more to be done.

We can’t waste time. This is a crisis. We can’t waste time, resources and energy on stiffer penalties and more criminalization. Historically, that doesn’t work, because we’re dealing with a public health problem. It doesn’t save lives. We need to help. Harm reduction organizations like ours, because they’ve already been on the ground that boots on the ground knowing how to get into treatment facilities, sober living homes, a street outreach in all different neighborhoods and things like that. They’re already there, so they need support so that they can expand their services, not create new programs…. Well, yes, in addition to creating new programs. but support those that are already leading the way.

In California, 1 in 10 people with a substance use disorder do not have access to treatment during a crisis of overdose. Twenty-two counties have no residential treatment. And I live in San Diego County and we get calls all the time for treatment beds and we have almost no youth detox, almost no treatment beds. It’s really frustrating.

My two sons work as drug and alcohol counselors and all of us getting these calls every day and having trouble trying to place people who at that moment really need to be in treatment. So we’re so far from our vision of treatment on demand despite the crisis. So we need to concentrate on that.

And I want to talk a little bit about medication assisted treatment. That’s not just Suboxone. It’s also Methadone, proven for decades to work to save lives. So… but it’s still… they’re still highly stigmatized. So I’d like to see the state investing more of their resources in recovery support services. And I don’t mean just abstinence-based recovery support services. I mean medication assisted recovery support services. Those people feel stigmatized in those meetings. So an educational campaign about the value of medication assisted treatment in all forms.

There’s an organization.. there’s a support group called Mara, Medication Assisted Recovery Anonymous. Nobody seems to know about it. We’ve started we started providing those. But but more people need that kind of support in order to sustain what is really a lifelong addiction.

AZ: Thank you.

DG: So I spent almost 22 years in policing. And as a sergeant, I ran an eight man multi-agency surveillance team that was tasked with dismantling meth labs back then. And at the same time I had a personal experience where my brother passed away from an overdose in 2007 because after 20 years of recovery, he lost his job, lost his insurance, lost access to his psychotropic meds, started self-medicating, went back into the criminal justice system, and then ended up overdosing.

So I look at this really complex problem that what we have to recognize is… this is a 21st century problem, and we have to pull law enforcement into 21st century solutions.  That… look, an arrest does not stop a public health issue: It’s very clear to me. So I want to acknowledge that I think all of us are here because we want to save people’s lives.

Conference on Crime, Panel 2: The Fentanyl Crisis. Sen. Kelly Seyarto speaks. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly

That is critically what the intent of not just our national drug control strategy should be, but the state level drug control strategies should be. And we should save the limited resources of law enforcement to go after the worst actors, which are the cartels, drug trafficking organizations, and develop robust harm reduction, evidence based programs that work at the root cause of substance use disorder.

This is so important that it’s not an either/or. If our intent is to save people’s lives, is the effective use of our resources would actually lead to public health outcomes with policing. And right now we know there’s all sorts of empirical research out there. One of our police chiefs of my organization, a retired police chief drug researcher co-authored a study that has been widely distributed not just domestically but internationally, that they analyzed two years of drug market disruptions in the state of Indiana with very regressive policing tactics to the drug war.

And what they saw – it was a fascinating study time temporal study – At seven days, 14 days and 21, those drug market disruptions actually increased fatal overdoses. It didn’t decrease them. It didn’t save lives. It actually made the problem worse.

And so every single one of us has a point and a place for us to advocate for smart solutions, but they have to be relative to outcome studies. And is the policy having the intended outcome?

And I would suggest to you, after 50 years of the drug war… I did my policing in the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, spent lots of time hooking, booking, taking pounds and hundreds of thousands of dollars off the table, that it did not save a single person’s life.

And deterrence only goes to a limited capacity. So how do we ensure that the people that need help get the help they need?

Investing in harm reduction. Investing in all sorts of treatment options. Law enforcement assisted diversion programs… the list goes on and on. But this is not a piecemeal this has got to be a long term strategy and just throwing people in jail isn’t working.

And in fact there’s a there’s another stat which is stunning, that there’s like a 27% chance when people get released from county jails or incarceration that they will overdose and die because there’s not effective treatment, even in spite of our most secure facilities. You can get drugs and people are overdosing right and left behind prison walls and county jail walls. And so holistic integrated response, saving the most harmful intervention, which is policing and the criminal justice system for really bad actors.

AZ: And that, I think, is going to lead us into the next portion of this discussion, because I think it seems like everyone is on the same page about public health initiatives and tackling this crisis in that way. But where folks seem to be divided on, as you mentioned, is that law enforcement component.

So to begin this discussion there are… we know there are two different types of victims to this drug. There are those who are actively seeking it, and then those there are those who are essentially, for lack of a better term, poisoned by it. And I say that in the in the sense of, for example, we hear about a lot of young teens or young adults that are trying to, you know, maybe seeking out another drug, but they end up either fatally overdosing or non-fatally overdosing because Fentanyl was mixed into the drug without their knowledge.

“In this day and age, [the dealers are] very well aware that what they are distributing is potentially lethal” – Sen. Kelly Seyarto

Should the distributors in these two different scenarios face the same consequences? And Diane, I’ll start with you.

DG: I think it’s a little more complex, and I don’t think that my brother was any less of a victim when he died from a drug overdose, despite him going out to the streets to find heroin and his drugs. Right, than anyone else who died, because it’s a policy failure. That, you know, there’s no controversy that the more we clamp down on a particular drug – We saw this with methamphetamine when my team ran meth lab crews. Right. Is, there were unintended consequences from the policy of removing cold medicine as a precursor. Yes. That type of methamphetamine, in fact, went down.

But what happened is creative chemists created P2P years ago, then called “Nazi method” of methamphetamine cooking, and it was still out there, but it was worse. And it was more potent. It was more pure. It caused more issues and problems. We’re seeing the exact same thing here is there’s this whack a mole strategy. We’re going to do this law. This is going to solve the problem, and it just displaces the drug problem into a newer, more pure, easier to smuggle drug.

AZ: Senator Seyarto.

KS: Well… The short answer is that people that are distributing it, whether it’s for to people that are long term users or the student for the first time… In this day and age, they’re very well aware that what they are distributing is potentially lethal. The people that are preparing those drugs for them to distribute, and I recognize that they are just on the lower part of the totem pole here… But they recognize that that is a a dangerous drug. And that one pill can potentially end the life of the person taking it, whether it’s the first time they’ve ever taken it.

Conference on Crime, Panel 2: The Fentanyl Crisis. L-R: Gretchen Burns Bergman, Parents for Addiction Treatment & Healing; Lt. Diane Goldstein (Ret.), Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly

And that’s a little bit of the difference between this drug and the drugs we’ve had to deal with in the past is, usually first time users don’t overdose. And or in some cases some people call it a poisoning. And so there has to be consequences for that. Otherwise you’re not… and when I say consequences, remember there’s just like was pointed out earlier, there’s a supply and a demand part here. We have to reduce the demand. And… but in the meanwhile, we have to insure that those that are supplying it understand what the repercussions are that and we’ve had laws that were attempted to be passed that gave them warnings after a first death of one of the people they distributed to that said, “hey, you understand that this is a bad drug, and if you’re distributing it there will be consequences,” but we don’t know, we haven’t landed where those consequences are and what’s effective yet.

And that’s why another reason I bring up the SB 19 that I passed but has not been incorporated yet. And instead we have a strategy, apparently, that is being formulated. And but I’m not at that table. I probably have more experience in this area than anybody in the legislature, and yet I’m not at the table.

And so when we’re developing strategies, that’s why a task force strategy approach, I think is really, really important. And so was that appropriate? What the appropriate thing for, for somebody that’s, it’s, that’s distributing is? You know, I’m open to suggestions, but there has to be a consequence for, for doing something that’s illegal, that’s harming people.

We hold the drug companies responsible. They just paid out a giant settlement. Some of that settlement money could be used to fund the task force and make sure that we have this comprehensive strategy that deals with all of this, all of these questions and can come up with the hopefully the more right answers for dealing with this.

AZ: Senator Cortese, what do you think?

DC: I think really this this issue kind of covers the whole spectrum of you know, of criminal law, criminal intent. We’ve seen… we just introduced a bill in response to the deaths of toddlers and infants, which we’ve seen in Santa Clara County where, you know, it’s hard to imagine the DA there will prove up malice aforethought, you know, murder. A parent purposely exposing a baby to you know, to fentanyl. But, you know, there again, on the, on the spectrum of criminal law and criminal intent they’ve definitely committed a crime. They’ve committed a… they’ve participated in criminal negligence at, at a minimum. And what that leads to, you know, would would likely be a severe sentence.

And I think that’s appropriate. I do think that’s appropriate. It’s unfortunate because what we’ve seen, at least in Santa Clara County, is, folks, again, as we’ve heard from some of the other panelists here, in and out of treatment frankly being, you know, counseled by social workers in the system and others on the behavioral health side. But we have… I want to mention we have another bill, and I’m not here trying to promote these bills, but to tell you where the problem gets deeper….

On utilization review, which is the review process for folks like that who are trying to stay in treatment and are booted out of treatment by insurance companies: private insurance insurers who basically after two weeks in, as if it’s parity with a broken leg, where you go home with a cast on and say, “hey, you should be fine by now. It’s been two weeks of treatment. Go back home.”

You know, if that addict goes back home and is using meth or fentanyl or anything that… around a vulnerable child like that. We’re… it’s foreseeable that we’re going to have a problem.

I think where it gets… more challenging. I think this is where the deeper dive by the legislature is, is appropriate, is that the homicide laws that we have on the books now and that spectrum of, you know, intent from malice aforethought and murder to manslaughter, criminal negligence.

Is that enough as codified right now to go after the cartels and the dealers that are, oftentimes – whether it’s directly over the border or online, you know – getting this product, often laced product, as we know, often things that look like over the counter drugs. Do we go after them and try to prove malice aforethought? Would the legislature come back at some point, you know, for the first time in ages, and say, “we’re going to alter, you know, the felony murder rule,” and say, if…

AZ: You’re jumping ahead a little bit. All right. My next topic.

DC: Okay, well, I’ll stop.

[garbled]

DC: Let me leave it in general terms and just say, you know, I think that’s really at the heart of the issue that we have these we have different facts, different circumstances. If you start leaning in on high school students that way, they’re probably not going to come forward and share much information with you, in terms of… they’re going to lawyer up and you’re not going to know where it’s coming from. If you use a restorative justice approach with high school students, which we’ve advocated – which doesn’t mean I’m soft on the crime. But I think it is an approach where you can come to agreement with a student that, you know, they’re a victim. They’re not going to be prosecuted, if they were in and around the distribution of fentanyl on their campus. But we need cooperation. We need to know where it came from, how it got there, and and who maybe should be prosecuted. And I’ll save the rest for later questions next. Thank you. One.

AZ: Yeah. Okay, Gretchen.

GBB: I’d like to weigh in. Yeah. The short answer: No, we should not create a different classes of dealers.

We know that most dealers are also users who might… On any given day… my two sons, when they were in the midst of their addiction, one could have been the dealer, one could have been user. That’s the way this this works.

But even those that might deal for profit are not incentivized to kill their clients. So I know I’ve heard of a lot of dealers who are actually are giving out Narcan on the streets as well. They’re not… they’re trying to help.

Fentanyl has replaced heroin in the drug supply. So now that now you can’t in San Diego County, you can’t purchase heroin if you wanted to. And so it is fentanyl that they’re getting and that it’s hard to tell what the different strengths are. And so it’s [garbled]  because it’s 50 to 100 times percent stronger, it’s hard to know when you’re taking a lethal dose.

I do not believe that harsher penalties are the answer. I think what can happen sometimes and has happened is that you take away a known dealer, and then they that person has to go to an unknown dealer with an unknown supply and somebody that doesn’t necessarily care as much about you. So there’s a backfire there. But, you know, fear mongering always backfires.

Our organization’s really concerned with the othering that’s happening with these two different classifications. We’re hearing a lot of, “my kid is a good kid. My kid is a straight A student. My kid was poisoned.” Eliciting a criminal justice response of murder. “My kid was murdered. He was a victim. He wasn’t like your addict kid who was a street addict.” And this kind of stigmatizing language and procedures is making the system so much, the whole thing, so much worse. People are dying. I say that that a public health approach is also a public safety approach.

AZ: Okay. So. As mentioned. So you kicked it off, Senator Cortese. But we know that there are some local jurisdictions that are trying to prosecute at least some of these fentanyl related deaths as murders.

Now, The New York Times just came out with an article recently noting that some of these prosecutions or these charges are on legal shaky ground because the state doesn’t have a specific law that really allows these deaths to be charged as such. So first, do you agree with that assessment? And second, do you think that needs to change? Should there be a law that allows for prosecutors to do this?

So we’ll just go down the line here. Senator Cortese, we’ll start with you.

DC: Yeah. Thank you. And to kind of continue that that line of discussion I just put out there a few minutes ago …that, you know, obviously it would be the first time in modern history that really that the legislature would go back and create a new definition of murder, after literally hundreds of years of case law that came all the way over from the the British. Which basically, you know, defines the, the requisite intent that’s necessary as malice aforethought, as we sometimes think of it, as premeditated. There needs to be some element of direct intent or premeditation.

We do have laws. I mentioned a few minutes ago, felony murder laws that will allow, in effect, a kind of transferred intent. But it’s hard to… at least based on the case studies I’ve seen, the fact patterns that I’ve seen… to see that again, in agreement with one of the panelists, that that even high level dealers, organized crime, are really going in with the intent, you know, to do bodily harm. Their intent is different. It’s you know… in they’re violating a number of crimes when they when they exercise the intent that they have. You know, moving illicit drugs across state lines, moving them across international borders, selling them online, reckless disregard, and criminal negligence.

But, you know, it’s I think the problem, I think what when people say I’d like to see murder charges, the law doesn’t really… Our criminal law system, which has worked pretty well in terms of assigning those kind of charges, you know, first degree or second degree murder, requires, and I think for good reason, that that there’s a level of intent that doesn’t exist, that’s well beyond negligence or the kind of negligence that comes when people have reckless disregard for what’s going to happen to people you know, when they’re they’re trying to make money.

Conference on Crime, Panel 2: The Fentanyl Crisis. Sen. Dave Cortese speaks. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly

So you know that my thought is the laws in place currently are, it’s not so much that they are good enough, but it’s not worth upending a criminal system that’s generally worked well. And if anything has overfilled our prisons in some cases with, you know, LWOP [Life Without Parole] and people on death row. You know, I’m not sure that we have a problem with enough laws to to prosecute these folks. I think the problem is that folks would like to see more murder charges instead of criminal negligence charges or whatever else is being done.

AZ: Senator Seyarto.

KS: Thank you. You know, whether you call it first degree murder or negligent homicide or criminal negligence, whatever it is, I think the fentanyl crisis is creating this issue within the court systems, and the DAs, about, well, where does it fit? Because it is certainly like I said before, it is certainly a different drug than we have dealt with in the past. And it is quickly becoming alarmingly clear, that it has deadly consequences for people who are taking one pill thinking that they might they’re trying to stay up late for to study for a test they got the next day. And a friend of a friend has something for them to help them do that.

And, generally the people that are distributing it absolutely know that there is a chance. And so I think there is something that we have to do that’s a little different to respond to this particular fentanyl issue, to be able to stifle some of the, the, the supply side. But as people have talked up here before, you know, we have to do something about the demand side. And that takes educating people before they even take it. Educating those kids that are taking think they’re taking an Adderall, that there is nothing safe that doesn’t come out of a pharmacy. So don’t take anything at all. So there’s a heavy education component to it.

There’s a treatment component for those folks that become addicted to it, because that is the marketing strategy of these folks, is to get them addicted. They might think they’re taking an Adderall, but then two days later they want another one and another one. Well, people don’t usually get addicted to Adderall. But they can get addicted to Adderall with this because they don’t know where that craving has come from.

But whatever that friend was has that pill that makes them feel like that. They’re addicted. And once they get addicted, it is very difficult to get them off.

And you know, our, our community based organizations are super valuable and helping create strategies for helping people to become unaddicted. But the problem is you got to get the people there in the first place. And that’s one of the shortcomings is there’s a lot of people that will refuse to get that treatment.

And this is a drug that the more we allow it to proliferate, the worse that problem is going to become. We won’t have enough CBOs to be able to help all those people. So we have to devise a different system just for this this particular drug, so that we don’t have more and more victims on the horizon.

AZ: Gretchen.

GBB: So I think the drug is a drug is a drug. There’ll always be a new drug. If you stifle one another one will come along. This is happening with Xylazine. It’s interesting. Fentanyl has become so politicized, and I think that’s part of the problem.

My understanding is that prosecutors have already secured convictions under for these cases, under existing law. Which is really disturbing to me because I live in one of the counties that is particularly taking a criminal justice approach, San Diego County, right behind Riverside County.

“Revenge and retribution is not going to bring their child back and charging another person, oftentimes the boyfriend of the girl that was overdosing, with murder is just going to make two families lose a loved one” – Gretchen Burns Bergman

And that’s despite our constant advocacy in that region. When I read the New York Times article, I have to tell you, I’m pretty passionate about this.  My stomach was turning at all the words that I was seeing. “Poisoned victim,” “murdered,” all, you know, and that there were moms groups, parents groups who were wanting to declare this a poisoning. And “my kid’s a good kid. Only bought one pill, and that one pill killed,” and othering the the those people like myself who, for me, it was decades of sleepless nights. Worried if your if your child was going to live or die, if the call that you were going to get in the middle of the night was from the morgue or the or the police or, you know…

And so some of us lived with that understanding that the shoe could drop and that your child could die. Knowing that they’re living in that kind of danger. Those parents who had no idea that their children were using drugs or buying their opioids, that they’re buying that in the internet, they know Percocet and etc. and, and and yes, it’s being laced in other… fentanyl is being laced in other things. But those parents were blindsided.

And I hear their pain and I and it’s it’s very difficult to even combat their messaging because they’re in such exquisite pain. Right.

But revenge and retribution is not going to bring their child back and charging another person, oftentimes the boyfriend of the girl that was overdosing, with murder is just going to make two families lose a loved one. Right.

So this is such a thorny issue that that that article was wonderful in that it really described all of that and how words matter so much with this.

I have to share one of our Moms United people. Her her name is Dr. Tammy Ault. She lost her son years ago to an overdose. And she said, “when my son died, I wanted somebody to hurt. Like I hurt. I wanted to somebody else to feel the exquisite pain that I was feeling. I wanted to charge somebody.” But she said, “I’m also a physician. And so I learned as much as I could about addiction and about harm reduction strategies.” And then she has become a major promoter of harm reduction strategies.

“We have the tools. We don’t need more laws. I’m absolutely clear about the rule of law and intent. We have enough laws on the books to go after people and hold them accountable” – Lt. Diane Goldstein

It’s, I think it’s our I feel it my responsibility as a parent to calm the waters and to bring us back to a position of tolerance and compassion, and so that we can actually find solutions that save lives, heal communities.

DG: So the complexities of this issue is about saving lives, right? How do how do we save lives? CDC data just came out yesterday. And and in 2022, which again is the issue with data, right. We know it’s going to increase in 2023.

There were 107,941 overdose deaths in the United States. And a large part of it is because of… absolutely we have the entire drug supply is poisoned. And I want to talk about the Adderall issue. It’s really interesting policy outcomes.

There’s an Adderall shortage right now in the country because of the DEA and its policy. And you know what? That’s fueling an increase in methamphetamine. And kids, college kids, our family, our friends or loved ones, who need Adderall are now going into the illicit market. This was the exact same policy during the Obama administration. When they start cracking down on the pill mills, it pushed people into the illicit market.

So we have to be really, really careful. So I’m going to talk about drug induced homicides. And I pulled up the Riverside stats because I think this is important.

So in 2021, Riverside had a 20.37% for every 100 K residents deaths. In 2023, it’s up to 23.6. Despite the increase in the 34 drug induced homicide filings. When I can only go back to my experience as a sergeant, I successfully prosecuted a drug induced homicide case back in the day on heroin. We have the tools. We don’t need more laws. I’m absolutely clear about the rule of law and intent. We have enough laws on the books to go after people and hold them accountable.

It’s incredibly, I think important to reflect that if we worked on, like years of a lack of infrastructure, going back to the 1983 when I got hired as a police officer for socioeconomic issues, whether it was substance use disorder, mental health:  Policy matters if we’re going to save people’s lives.

And an increase in drug induced homicides doesn’t save lives, it doesn’t even deter drug dealers. You know who it deters? It deters our loved ones, our families, and our friends who may be using with someone, from not calling 911 in order to save their loved one’s life.

What we’re seeing across the country, about 50% of the drug induced homicide prosecutions, and it’s a little bit of an older study, over 50% were people that were using together. They were low level sustenance level, maybe drug dealers. They were not cartels or kingpins or the people that we really should be saving our resources for.

It’s incredibly expensive to prosecute people in the state of California. We all know it. It’s what now, $110,000 a year to incarcerate one person in Department of Corrections. Why do we continue to use the same policies to try to fix a problem that that policy never addressed and never fixed? We’re just spinning our wheels right now.

So the more we do demand reduction… Studies have been out there going for years. Rand in 1994 showed that for every dollar invested in treatment, it returns seven times the dollar and value to the taxpayers. Overdose prevention centers may be controversial in California, but there’s been studies that show that it reduces health care costs significantly.

Let’s start looking at all the options that are available, not just using the only tool that the cops have, which is a hammer. That really is an incredibly harmful intervention. And let’s save that for the people that are, in fact, deserving of that punishment.

AZ: So, Diane, I want to start with you on this one. I mean, what role and, yeah, what role do social media companies and the internet have in, in all of this? And should there be more regulations or more rules or even maybe some penalties, on these companies for maybe providing a marketplace for these drugs?

DG: Boy, I’ll tell you, as a civil libertarian and a strong proponent of the First Amendment, I am unbelievably conflicted about social media right now relative to the retail issues. You know that the earlier panel was right on. I think that there’s a lot of complexities. And as a person who really believes in American civil liberties, I think that’s a path that we should be really, really careful, in what we do with that, because it’s not potentially going to get us the right intended policy outcome that we want.

AZ: Gretchen, what do you think?

GBB: Yeah, I agree, it’s really a thorny issue. And social media can be influential. That’s good. Social media can be influential. It can be bad.

What we need more, though, on social media is honest drug education. Youth are watching. They’re participating in this they need to know about drugs, their interactions with each other. What… They need to know. Not not to use alone. Not to lock their bathroom doors. They need to carry fentanyl test strips. All these things that are very controversial. They don’t want you to talk about this with kids. And yet kids are out there, you know, watching their social media and buying drugs on the internet.

So we need a campaign of truth, of reality based, scientific, proven facts about drug, drug use, dangers, etc.. I would love to see that kind of campaign used on social media to… as outreach to youth.

AZ: Senator Seyarto.

KS: All right. I have a similar opinion about social media. It has two roles. One of them is a very, very important role in the education. They have more outreach. So very social… the various social media platforms have more outreach than anything else we have nowadays, and especially to our young people.

And so I think there is a big responsibility there for them to become heavily involved in the education part of this.

However, there’s also drug distribution. And while social media has developed ways of keeping from inciting riots and things like that, this should be something that they should be on the lookout for. And you know, and like our fellow panelists down here, I’m a little conflicted by that because, you know, absolutely, there’s a there’s an issue with the First Amendment. But at the same time like I said before, this is this is a little different. This is a little different drug than the drugs I had to deal with on the street back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Conference on Crime, Panel 2: The Fentanyl Crisis. L-R: Ashley Zavala, KCRA; Sen. Dave Cortese; Sen. Kelly Seyarto; Gretchen Burns Bergman, Parents for Addiction Treatment & Healing; Lt. Diane Goldstein (Ret.), Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly

And so I think social media plays an important role in both. They have to recognize that role, and we have to make… ensure that they have the resources to do the education part, which is why this is an all of the above approach. I kind of get the feeling sometimes that people think it’s either the law enforcement or the only drug or only treatment. And this is not this is not a war on between the two. This is a “we need to figure out what the right balance of all of it is.”

And so it’s we shouldn’t be in that that argument right now. What we need to do is figure it out, figure out what that balance is. And that’s the approach that I wanted to take. That was the intent of, of our previous legislation. And so and that would deal with education and social media. So I’ll pass it off to my colleague.

AZ: Yeah. What do you think?

DC: I mean, this is an issue that’s, if anything, I think really understated in terms of public policy right now. We’ve… and I don’t know how much this is actually realized by general public or journalists, you know, are generally well educated on policy. Section 230, federal section 230 disallows us at the state level from creating any judicial cause of action to enjoin or to create a damages/remedies for content uploaded to an internet platform. Period. Full stop. Can’t do it

If you do it. I mean, if we didn’t do it, every single one of those causes of action would be dismissed immediately upon arrival. Basically, you file the suit in the next minute, someone’s going to be in chambers dismissing the suit on the other side. Therefore, you know, internet platforms don’t even have ordinary service of process. They don’t have contact points, as you know.

A family that’s, you know, becomes aware that a kid using some of these factors, we’ve been talking about, a child in the family was about to or did in fact secure, you know, laced or any kind of drugs. Adderall or anything else, over the internet has essentially no cause of action, no remedy, typically no one to even contact at an internet platform. The only entity that could fix that is Congress. What are the odds of that happening anytime soon? When they have a hard time just getting emergency budget measures out, let alone, you know, altering or reversing section 230.

“Folks have in organized crime have essentially created implicitly a legitimized partner in internet platforms, in distribution of these substances. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it here in California until [Section 230] is changed” – Sen. Dave Cortese

We have run bills every single year I’ve been here to try to create simple causes of action that say that, you know, inappropriate contact, like CSAM. Trying to incite a riot. These are not, as we all know, journalists know, are not protected by the First Amendment.

You cannot successfully create a cause of action to, at state level, so that somebody can have that content removed in a reasonable amount of time.

We had a bill last year to remove CSAM in 48 hours at the petition of the guardian or parent. The bills [were] analyzed over and over again by the attorneys up here, even though, you know, it started moving through the process as futile. Because you can’t get that that taken down.

So you know, when I said it’s I think one of the most understated policy problems that we face right now. I don’t want to get down a slippery slope, but since I’m among journalists here, you know, I see that rule federal section 230, combined with the rapid innovation around AI as probably, you know, fatal to journalism as we see it today. I think the Writers Guild saw that last year in terms of their work.

And we’re going to have to get to this and folks have in organized crime have essentially created implicitly a legitimized partner in internet platforms, in distribution of these substances. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it here in California until that federal rule is changed.

AZ: I’ve got one more before we go to audience questions. And if we could keep the responses to this one maybe tight, so we can again make sure that everyone could ask questions in the audience. But you’re great at leading me into my next question. You mentioned Congress. You mentioned Section 230. What else can the federal government do here that the state cannot on this crisis? And, Senator Seyarto, let’s go to you.

KS: All right. Well I will keep it brief. The the federal government has a role in drugs coming in and out of the United States. And if they could put more of a squeeze on the supply side that would have the effect in a supply and demand market of increasing the prices and squeeze some people right out of the market, which would be good. But that’s only a start, because we really have to work on the demand side. And the demand side is all about education, treatment and emergency treatment as well. So they need to do their job on that side. And because it’s a job only they have the authority to do.

AZ: Gretchen, what do you think?

GBB: I’m happy to see that the federal government is acknowledging that that we need to use harm reduction to address this crisis. But there’s such a slow rollout of resources. It’s not matching the magnitude of the problem. And we’re also seeing a lot of harm reduction lite programs coming along, people who don’t really understand the depth of these lifelong substance use disorders. It’s not a one and done thing.

So the need for long term recovery support services, and and really a good understanding of the issue not just in dealing with an addictive illness, but in dealing with a lifelong substance use disorder. And of course, in dealing with the immediate crisis of overdose deaths.

DG: Okay. Real quick federal government I think needs to invest much more in the demand side versus the supply side. I’m just going to go back to the modern day drug war.

We’ve spent over $1 trillion that mainly has been focused on supply side interventions, going back to Richard Nixon. And in that time, over a trillion dollars, if, in fact, the emphasis on supply side would work, drugs would not be readily available like they are across our country. The purity level would be much lower, and the cost impact would be really high. And we’re not. We’ve never seen those spikes.

There’s some economic spikes that on occasion, depending on which part of the country geographically you’re in, drug prices will go up or go down. But right now, our kids can access anything they want, and we need to really focus on prevention.

I’d like the social media companies to engage in public safety campaigns at their cost. Right? There’s I think there’s a lot of things that we can do. But just and, you know, is… Congress can’t even pass the appropriations bill that would give Customs and Border Protection actually access to the machines that they need. They’re sitting there unused. Right?

We have to take the politics out of the drug crisis, the retail theft crisis, in order to save people’s lives. What we are doing is fighting each other and it’s harmful.

AZ: Anything else, Senator Cortese?

DC: Yeah. I mean, just let me say, and I know we aren’t debating or anything like that, but I’m very skeptical of not cynical about social media companies taking social responsibility on and doing right. Anything that’s going to cost them money every time somebody uploads something, I mean, that’s all they care about. It’s all their shareholders care about.

[The] Federal government, I mean, it’s been said by the other panelists… resources, we’re facing a huge gap, as you all know, in our budget. I don’t know what’s going on exactly in other states, but having been in government a long time, most years we’re facing some kind of a deficit. We don’t print money like the federal government.

We see what happens, including in California, when the federal government says, “here’s resources, but you need to compete and you need to match” you know, “you need to engage.” You know, we come together. I’m impressed. I personally, that Senator Seyarto and I, from different sides of the aisle, really have a lot of agreement. At least I agree with most of what he said today. And I think if resources are pushed down by the federal government, we will use them appropriately as a legislature and will take advantage of them. But that would really help.

AZ: Okay. Thank you. Any audience questions?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I have two sons. I have two teenage boys. I.. after having a successful year career as a congressional aide, I went back to law school and worked at our… my public defender’s office in Marin County. And every time I would go to see a client in in county jail, I would go and grab a couple of boxes of, of Narcan, every single time, throw them in my purse, take them home. The poor boys are like, what is this? And I’m like, throwing. I just throw it in their room.

But one of the concerns within my sons’… within my sons’ friend group,. or the moms on our text chain is the moms cannot get Narcan. You know, they’re like, “how do you get it?” “I get it from the county jail.” And I give it, you know, I gave it to a friend.

“Narcan was probably the drug that I used most when I was a paramedic. And I think if we can teach everybody to do CPR on the street, we can certainly teach them to administer Narcan” – Sen. Kelly Seyarto

So what about using the school districts, leveraging their power and really having Narcan available in a vending machine right now? My sons’ high school, they have Narcan, but it’s behind the front desk. It’s locked. It’s sealed. I mean, you have to go, like, go through so many steps to even get the Narcan. And it’s the parents who just want to have it in their home.

GBB: Can I respond to that? It’s right up my alley. Yeah. For the. For the last five years, we’ve been really working towards outreach. Outreach with youth. We want youth to carry Narcan. We’ve been publicly shamed for saying so. But gradually, that’s happening in San Diego County. Our school districts are, are carrying, allowing us access to the kids giving out Narcan.

Since 2014, we’ve been giving it out. Started out with parent to parent. And now, and then it expanded to outreach to the unsheltered communities and sober living homes and that kind of thing.

I really believe that youth are the answer. I think we need to develop youth harm reduction ambassadors. There’s no reason that you would have to go to the jail to get Narcan. I mean, it’s… we’re trying to distribute it. At what county are you in?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Marin County.

GBB: Wow. Yeah, in San Diego County, It’s all over now.

One of the things we’re working on is trying to get vending machines in all the schools. Ideally, everybody would have. I carry it in my purse always.

KS: Can I weigh in on it, too?

GBB: Yeah.

KS: So Narcan was probably the drug that I used most when I was a paramedic. And I think if we can teach everybody to do CPR on the street, we can certainly teach them to administer Narcan by one of the several means that they are starting to change. When it was just I, you know, I am or, you know, sticking a needle in somebody. Some people don’t have the stomach to do that. But now they have nasal, and they have other ways of getting Narcan into system.

The only problem I have is that there is an education component that goes with it because there are side effects that can be rather nasty and can also be lethal when somebody is waking up from being… after being administered Narcan. And so and, and the other part of that is that we can’t give people the impression that, okay, as long as I have my Narcan over here, I’m safe taking this drug. Because somebody has to administer it. And a lot of times the deaths that we find with kids, they’re in the rooms alone. There’s nobody to administer the Narcan.

So we can’t give the impression that that is a cure all and that they life goes on, as usual, taking drugs. Because in this particular case, it isn’t. You have to have somebody to administer it. It has to be done the right way, and you have to be ready for the side effects. And seeing people that are users of something that are by themselves, they don’t get help in four to five minutes, they’re going to have brain damage or they will die.

DC: Just a couple a couple quick points, hopefully to be helpful. The bill I talked about, SB 10 last year, requires your school at each campus, not just in the district, your school safety plan will now have to address the fentanyl accessibility. The state has provided basically unlimited amounts of Narcan to the schools, if they’ll take it. We have one big district in San Jose that’s been reluctant, like the one you described. They say, “well, that goes in the nurse’s station.” And, you know, it doesn’t help anybody on a sports field or anywhere else, obviously.

Lastly, Senator Portantino has introduced a bill and Claire, over here, raise your hand. Claire could give you that bill number. We just heard it in Senate Education Committee yesterday to make Narcan more ubiquitous. And I will talk to him about whether or not he can add to the bill, amend the bill to make sure that it can be take home as well. The training is about ten minutes, as you probably know. But to Senator Seyarto’s point, you still have to have the training. I mean, it’s not ten minutes you could skip. Thank you.

GBB: Can I just jump in one more? This is what it is. [HOLDS UP NARCAN]

It’s so easy to administer. There’s there’s directions on the side of it. If you see somebody that’s overdosed and you’re not sure if it’s an opioid overdose or not, and you give them this, it’s not going to hurt them. It’d be like water.

If it is an opioid, it could bring them to in a violent manner. We tell people to step back in case that happens, because the person, you’re sort of interrupting their high. They didn’t know that they were losing their lives or leaving the planet at that moment. But it is so safe and now, so easy. And I’m talking about from years of teaching people to inject an orange… But now there’s no reason on the planet that everybody should not have access to this to save a life.

CAPITOL WEEKLY: And I think that’s going to have to be our final note because we are at time. Thank you so much to our panelists, and thank you to Ashley Zavala for moderating.

Thanks to our Conference on Crime sponsors: THE TRIBAL ALLIANCE OF SOVEREIGN INDIAN NATIONS, WESTERN STATES PETROLEUM ASSOCIATION, PHYSICIAN ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA; KP PUBLIC AFFAIRS, PERRY COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITOL ADVOCACY, THE WEIDEMAN GROUP, LANG, HANSEN, GIROUX & KIDANE and CALIFORNIA PROFESSIONAL FIREFIGHTERS