![]() 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. One group, Mothers Against Drug Deaths, pays homage to MADD by borrowing its acronym.Ĭalifornia Prosecutors want to charge fentanyl drug dealers with murder, sparking legal battle 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. The bill would have made it easier for California prosecutors to convict the sellers of lethal drugs on homicide charges.Ĭapelouto’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. So the suburban dad, who once devoted all his time to running his print shop and raising his four daughters, launched a group called Drug Induced Homicide and traveled from his home to Sacramento in April to lobby for legislation known as Alexandra’s Law. The self-described political moderate said the experience made him cynical about California’s reluctance to impose harsh sentences for drug offenses. (Orange County district attorney’s office)
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