"Rebekah A"CA Politics California is one of many states that have seen a statistically significant increase in deaths by drug overdose within the last three years (CDC). Nationwide, a staggering 200 people a day are dying of drug overdose. Prescription and non-prescription opioids are to blame for this high number. Opioids are a class of drugs that include prescription pills, heroin, and a synthetic opioid called Fentanyl. In prescription form, Opioid pills are prescribed to treat severe pain. The problem is that the pills are also made illegally and over-prescribed by doctors, sometimes intentionally. They are highly addictive. Authorities suspect that the surfacing of Fentanyl in California has caused an increase in Opioid-related drug overdoses. Fentanyl is an Opioid that is also treated for severe pain. What makes it different from others is that it is made synthetically in labs by drug traffickers who mix Fentanyl with other drugs such as Heroin, Cocaine, Methamphetamine, and MDMA, drugs that are commonly bought and sold on the streets of California cities. Fentanyl is drastically more lethal than heroin, at any dose and has been found in other drugs at alarming levels recently. Fentanyl primarily comes into California from Mexico via the San Diego border. Fentanyl seizures increased by 135 percent during 2017. Overall, drug seizures at the San Diego border increased from 8,900 pounds in 2010 to nearly 82,000 pounds in 2018, marking epidemic levels. In 2017, drug overdose became the leading cause of death in the United States, surpassing car accidents, HIV, and gun violence (DEA 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment).
Executive Action In 2017, President Trump declared the Opioid crisis a national emergency and vowed to grant funds and resources to states in order to effectively put the epidemic to an end. By executive order, he established the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. The three parts of the commission focus on and allocate funds to prevention, treatment, and enforcement. To carry out this plan, the DOJ is requesting a budget of approximately 300 million dollars. The breakdown of the money would be 40 million dollars to increase DEA agents that target drug trafficking organizations, 7 million for research on Fentanyl seizures, 3 million for the enforcement of law and safety against drugs, and 254 million to set up High Intensity Drug Trafficking Programs in areas that need it the most such as Los Angeles. If this budget is passed, the federal government will make great strides in the efforts to stall the rising Opioid crisis in California’s inner cities and greater rural areas as well. President Trump has stated, numerous times, that illegal drugs enter the U.S. via open ports of entry that California shares with Mexico. The President posits this fact in support of his proposed border wall at the South West Border between San Diego and Mexico. It is true that cartels get drug shipments into California via ports of entry. However, it is highly debatable whether Mexican cartels ever circumvent legal ports of entry to get their drugs into California. According to the DEA, these shipments of drugs usually come directly through legal ports of entry in all types of vehicles, including personal vehicles. With that being said, at the executive level, the Opioid and drug epidemic has been erroneously linked to the Border Wall, another hot topic in California. Perhaps some of the drugs do enter the state via illegal ports of entry but most come straight through the legal ports. If this is definitely the case, then it would be helpful to invest in drug trafficking enforcement at the border’s legal ports of entry. State and Local Impacts In 2018, California Governor Brown vetoed a bill that would enable the City of San Francisco to offer safe drug consumption programs for adults. This bill would have decreased drug users in the streets of San Francisco by providing a particular space for them to safely and hygienically consume their own drugs. Moreover, the bill would have made opportunities for health and safety education available to drug abusers. The streets of San Francisco have become increasingly trashed with the needles of drug users that abuse heroin, creating a concern for public health and safety. The city has a few model safe-injection clinics set up and newly-elected SF Mayor Breed has made it her priority to get real clinics set up as soon as possible. Of course, the problem is that workers in these clinics could be federally prosecuted since the city doesn’t have the approval to operate safe injection sites. Ultimately, safe injection sites would provide San Franciscans with a more sanitary city and are projected to drastically decrease drug abuse, according to medical examiners in support of the bill. Mayor Breed says that the fight for safe injection sites is not over. In fact, in 2019, the bill has been re-authored by Senator Scott and Stockton Assemblywoman Eggman. If it clears the senate and assembly, newly-elected California Governor Newsom will have the final say in whether Mayor Breed can go forward with the operation of these safe injection sites. In areas such as Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, the Opioid epidemic is not a hot topic in its local elections. One possible reason why is because California has not been hit by the epidemic as badly as other states. However, according to the DEA, the epidemic is quickly spreading to California, attempting to make Cali its next victim. This could mean that the 2020 election may include the Opioid epidemic as a hot topic. The evidence of the spreading epidemic is the mass importation of Fentanyl into California (via the Mexico and SD border), the drug that has devastated other states and sparked increases in California’s death by drug overdose rates. The connection between Fentanyl and California cities (particularly L.A.) will be analyzed in the next blog post. Local and federal institutions have teamed up to ameliorate the crisis. The next post will focus on the specific local institutions that are involved in countering the crisis. These institutions include the DEA Fusion Task Force in L.A., Opioid crisis coalitions that aim to limit the prescriptions of Opioids in the Inland Empire, and several city attorney’s class action lawsuit with Big Pharma companies over the emergence and enablement of the crisis.
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AuthorUndergraduate student generated content. Blog posting and updating done by Kristina Flores Victor, Assistant Professor of Political Science at CSUS Archives
March 2020
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