(NewsNation) — A California coroner said that while the fentanyl crisis is a “complex issue,” there are two things local governments need in order to combat the problem.
“We need more money for locals to be able to stay in the fight on fentanyl,” Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said on “NewsNation Now.” “And then you have to deal with going back, if we go back to the supply chain issues, and go all the way back to China, get them to stop their chemical companies from producing the precursors, and then transiting those down to the border. That’s probably one of the first steps. And then, of course, securing our border.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates synthetic opioid deaths at 79,815 between September 2022 and August 2023 and 57,997 from September 2023 to August 2024.
Barnes said his department first began seeing the presence of fentanyl in 2015. He and others in law enforcement have been trying to persuade lawmakers to include “enhanced penalties” for fentanyl.
“It’s been rejected year after year after year,” he said. “And it created this perverse environment for the cartels to traffic pure fentanyl because the consequences were far less than doing that.”
