LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.—“Look at those braces. Alex was the light of my life,” Amy Neville said while looking at an image of her son, Alexander.
“The last time I saw him alive was about 9 p.m. in the evening. He was gone the following morning,” she said.
In June 2020, 14-year-old Alexander was found by his mother lying on his bedroom floor in a lifeless state after ingesting a lethal dose of fentanyl.
She was joined by Orange County’s Sheriff Don Barnes and District Attorney Todd Spitzer, who shared about fentanyl deaths in the county, which they said has increased over 1000 percent in the last five years.
Amy said her son stumbled upon the drug through the popular social media app Snapchat.
“There’s such an ease to selling drugs off Snapchat and other social media when these dealers become friends with our kids and take them on a grooming process,” she said.
By about the eighth interaction, dealers utilizing the app can sometimes even get the kids to sell the drugs for them, Neville said.
She said several features on Snapchat make it easy for children to buy drugs, including its disappearing content, anonymity, no age limit, and availability of the user’s location at any time.
In many cases, teens who had died were looking for the pharmaceuticals Xanax or Oxycodone via social media, but unknowingly receive counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl instead.
Tackling the Fentanyl Crisis
Both District Attorney Todd Spitzer and Sheriff Don Barnes said many fentanyl deaths are preventable by implementing stricter punishments for dealers, but such bills fail to pass in the state Legislature.“We have people leaving my jails telling my deputies that they cannot wait to go and get high,” Barnes said. “Crimes that were once a felony are now a misdemeanor in this state ... and there’s a proliferation of reoccurring drug use.”
Last year, law enforcement saw a 594 percent increase in fentanyl seizures throughout the state, much of which is due to the state’s proximity to drug smuggling routes along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Barnes, who now has a special unit of officers patrolling at the border to prevent fentanyl from reaching Orange County.
“This is probably the greatest area we get these drug seizures,” he said. “These cartels have logistics, litigation, are well organized in their business, and are violent.”
The Sheriff said two of the primary cartels involved in fentanyl smuggling into California are the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation crime syndicates, who often work with smaller gang alliances in their distribution methods.
“You need to know that these cartels are great at making their drugs look like pharmaceuticals,” Barnes said. “You cannot tell the difference between a pill with fentanyl and a pill without it. ... Kids, you need to tell your friends this.”
For District Attorney Spitzer, prosecuting fentanyl-related drug crimes through California’s courts, he said, has not been effective. His team now takes cases to the federal level of control where penalizations for certain drug distributions carry a minimum prison sentence of 20 years.
“Because the solution in Sacramento is not to go after drug dealers and put them in prison,” Spitzer said. “[California’s] Legislature keeps doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting it do something different, but nothing changes. As the DA, we are going through a federal back door to prosecute these crimes and go around the California Legislature to do so.”
“We will help anyone that wants to help themselves, but we are not going to give one inch to criminals that want to hurt our community,’ he said. “You live in the safest large county in California, and we are fighting like heck to keep it that way.
