Signal Booster: The Terrible Toll of Fentanyl

The opioid epidemic hasn’t spared the southern end of the Santa Clara Valley, as Michael Moore of the Gilroy Dispatch reports. The deaths of three young men led their mothers to meet with Gilroy Councilmember Rebeca Armendariz and Congressman Jimmy Panetta to talk about the problem. Their sons apparently didn’t know they were consuming pills laced with fentanyl, which can be 100 times stronger than morphine. Eleventh-grader Fernando Sanchez, 17, passed away after swallowing what he thought was Xanax, purchased off the street. The other victims—Jacob Vasquez, 24, and Joseph David Saavedra, 26—perished under similar circumstances.

These were only three of the 49 fentanyl-related deaths that struck Santa Clara County in 2021. Bad as this is, it was worse in 2019, when 88 died. “Fentanyl is more of a poison than a drug,” Councilmember Armendariz said. “People have died unintentionally.” The district attorney’s office is meeting the problem with treatment options as well as prosecution—though charging a dealer with murder isn’t an easy matter to prove. People who use street narcotics are urged to “expect fentanyl” and keep the anti-OD medicine Narcan on hand.