2023-09-19 07:35:34
In San Diego, California
California is hit by the fentanyl crisis that is spreading like an epidemic throughout the United States.
In San Diego this crisis due to fentanyl consumption is terrible, it is the main cause of deaths in people between 18 and 48 years of age. San Diego is one of the main entry routes for this drug into the United States.
Forensic reports in this city explain that accidents related to drugs and alcohol have increased by 139 percent. Many of these losses are related to fentanyl use.
By 2021, fentanyl became responsible for 62 percent of adult overdose deaths. In children and babies the figure is even more alarming. According to reports from Randy Children’s Hospital, deaths from fentanyl in infants and children under 5 years of age have increased 1,600 percent in the last 4 years. Many of these children have consumed this drug by mistake, because their parents have left it within their reach and they have ingested it.
The San Diego authorities have launched an emergency plan to reduce deaths from this drug. Some vending machines have even been installed in California County and the strategy is to expand the number of them, to be able to supply them for free. naloxone.
Naloxone is a medicine that quickly reverses an opioid overdose, fentanyl is one of these substances. Naloxone blocks the effects of opioids and helps restore normal breathing in 2 or 3 minutes for a person who has consumed these substances.
The first vending machine was placed at the McAlister South Bay Regional Recovery Center in Chula Vista. Chula Vista is very close to Tijuana, another city, but in Mexico, which faces a huge crisis due to fentanyl consumption.
As of April of this year, San Diego, California, is the most used route for fentanyl trafficking from Mexico. The highest number of fentanyl seizures have been made here, but there are other states like Arizona.
Almost 63% of everything seized on the southwest border in 2020 were shipments of fentanyl. It has been a good job by the California authorities, because detecting fentanyl is very difficult because it has no smell and this makes it very difficult to detect.
But in addition, much of the fentanyl enters with American citizens, which initially made it more difficult to detect. This was announced by the Department of Homeland Security.
Public health problem
With the use of new technologies at the ports of entry to San Diego, many seizures have been achieved, and today drug traffickers are looking for alternatives such as the border in Arizona. You have to be careful, because in Arizona the consumption of fentanyl can become a public health problem.
Mexican cartels are beginning to concentrate their merchandise from Sonora to Tucson, but the situation in California is critical. There are hundreds of deaths, especially on the Mexican side of the border in Tijuana, Baja California, where starting in 2020, fentanyl manufacturers began using homeless people as an experiment to see the weight of fentanyl they would use for their consumers in the United States. Joined.
But it’s not just San Diego, the entire state of California is in crisis due to fentanyl consumption.
The California Department of Health reported that 6,843 overdose deaths were reported in 2021 alone, of which 5,722 were due to fentanyl use. State authorities have detected that between 2017 and 2021, overdose deaths grew 200%, mainly among African Americans and Latinos.
While, in Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health detailed that between April 2020 and March 2021 more than two thousand homeless people died, an increase of 56% compared to the same period a year earlier.
This synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger and more addictive than heroin has made many of its users homeless.
For example, in Los Angeles, in 2019, the Homeless Services Authority of that city carried out a report in which it detected that a quarter of all homeless adults, who live on the streets, suffered from a mental illness, while that another 14% suffered from substance use disorders.
In some parts of the city, addicts are seen in a “zombie” state, unable to receive care, in many cases because the number of users exceeds police and health workers.
Last weekend, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he increased the deployment of National Guard service members to 50%, increasing from 40 to 60 soldiers at the four ports of entry between the United States and Mexico , to support the detection of illicit drugs, including fentanyl.
Another example is what happens in San Francisco, California. In a neighborhood of that city called the Tenderloin, people can be observed trafficking, using, or going into crisis due to an overdose of fentanyl.
At the end of August, 18 homeless people died following using fentanyl, with no emergency services able to help them.
This caused a cleanup of one of the main streets, just to hide the true health crisis that that city, as well as the entire state of California, is going through.
While last July it was announced that 18 people died accidentally from consuming the same drug, believing that it was cocaine mixed with other drugs. And drug traffickers mix fentanyl with any other drug to make them much more addictive.
San Francisco authorities claim that fentanyl began to be mixed with other drugs, and that now consumers prefer to only buy fentanyl regardless of its lethality, because it is much cheaper than cocaine and heroin.
In California there are so-called tolerance zones for users of fentanyl and other opioids; these places have become refuges for those who are homeless and addicted. They are people who are alone, on the streets, they have lost their will and it will be difficult for them to recover.
For several years now, the United States has been going through a severe health crisis of fentanyl consumption, but the state of California is so far the one that has one of the most serious health crises.
In California alone, one billion dollars have been allocated to counteract health problems caused by overdoses, including the distribution of naloxone.
The use of fentanyl is a crisis that will take a lot of work to control.
1695127099
#California #plagued #fentanyl #Opinion
