Faced with a surging fentanyl death toll, a growing number of prosecutors in woke San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area have finally started pursuing stiff jail terms — including life sentences — for drug dealers whose customers wind up overdosing.
The move is a reversal for many of the region’s more progressive-leaning district attorneys, who have long favored more lenient, treatment-based sentencing for drug offenses instead of prison.
The soft-on-crime sentencing policies have historically made it exceedingly difficult to successfully prosecute drug crimes, even as the overdose crisis spirals out of control.
However with more than 7,300 Californians dying from opioids in 2022 alone and last year outpacing 2020 as the deadliest year on record for overdoses in San Francisco with over 800, city leaders have started pushing to crack down on those responsible.
Starting last year, some of the Golden State’s more conservative areas — such as Sacramento, Fresno, San Joaquin, San Bernardino and others — began charging fentanyl dealers with homicide in an effort to slow down the scourge, the Los Angeles Times reports.
In July, Placer County sent a man to prison for 15 years-to-life on second-degree murder charges after he gave a pill contaminated with fentanyl to a teenager who later died.
Then in August, jurors in Riverside delivered a guilty second-degree murder verdict in a case of a man who gave a lethal dose of the drug to a 26-year-old woman, the outlet writes.
Now, leaders in deep-blue San Francisco, including Mayor London Breed and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins are poised to do the same.
This spring, the city is expected to finalize a new law enforcement task force that could also see drug dealing and opioid deaths in the city prosecuted as homicides.
Last October, Breed issued a statement announcing the initiative, in which she put fentanyl dealers “on notice” that peddling the synthetic opioid “could lead to homicide charges.”
San Francisco has become a tragic symbol of the nation’s fentanyl nightmare, with large swaths of the historic City by the Bay decaying into opioid-fueled wastelands rife with street crime and open-air drug markets.
Last year the city notched a record 806 accidental overdose deaths, according to city figures.
The issue is a personal one for Breed, whose younger sister died of a drug overdose in 2006.
“The reason why I’ve given clear direction to be much more aggressive in tackling this problem has a lot to do with the loss of life, and also the violence surrounding the drug market,” she said.
“Because of the number of overdoses, and because it’s directly linked to the drugs, there needs to be a link to the people who are selling this poison that is actually killing people.”
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl is up to 50-times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.
The Drug Enforcement Administration says just two milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal — an amount so small it could fit on the end of a pencil.
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Chris Nesi
