Inside weeks of educators reviving college students at two San Jose excessive faculties, a Bay Space legislator introduced Monday he plans to introduce a brand new invoice to deal with the rising variety of younger folks dying from the highly effective artificial opioid fentanyl.
State Sen. Dave Cortese mentioned he was impressed to draft the invoice partially by a Bay Space Information Group report final month, which discovered that fentanyl deaths have spiked sixfold amongst California youths aged 15-to-24 within the final three years.
“Fentanyl now causes one fifth of youth deaths in California,” Cortese mentioned, citing the report. “It might probably’t wait any longer.”
The drug, which is taken into account 50 occasions stronger than heroin, has exploded throughout the nation within the final half-decade and is more and more turning up in illicit drugs that teenagers can simply purchase off the web comparable to examine medicine like Adderall and customary painkillers like Percocet.
Cortese’s invoice, which will likely be drafted when the legislative session begins this December, will incentivize college districts all through the state to make use of cash from the state’s Psychological Well being Companies act to fund fentanyl schooling and consciousness packages.
“What’s most necessary proper now's to get into center faculties and excessive faculties, since we have now a captive viewers throughout the state,” Cortese mentioned.
The invoice would additionally unencumber funding for faculties to top off on Narcan, an over-the-counter nasal spray that may forestall a severe fentanyl overdose from changing into a demise.
Final month, the principal of Overfelt Excessive Faculty reportedly used Narcan to deal with a scholar who was overdosing on a capsule laced with fentanyl. Then simply final week, a social employee at Oak Grove Excessive who had simply gone via a coaching program on administering Narcan saved an unresponsive scholar the very subsequent morning, mentioned Santa Clara County Superintendent of Colleges Dr. Mary Dewan.
Cortese mentioned he’s modeling the invoice off of the work of Santa Clara County’s fentanyl working group, which is comprised of medical consultants, households who've misplaced family members to fentanyl, and elected officers. The group has been serving to safe funding for Santa Clara faculties to top off on Narcan kits, and is coaching college employees on how one can administer it.
“What we all know is it has already saved lives,” mentioned Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez, who shaped the group earlier this 12 months. “However we additionally know that there’s no time to attend.”
The Bay Space Information Group report discovered that previous to fentanyl’s rise, the whole variety of yearly deaths for Californians ages 15 to 24 sometimes hovered round 3,000. Since 2020, that quantity has skyrocketed to almost 4,000 deaths per 12 months. Fentanyl accounted for greater than 750 of these deaths in every of the previous two years.
Geralyn Maul-Vasquez, who can also be a member of the working group and misplaced her personal 24-year-old son Jacob final 12 months to fentanyl, mentioned the price of inaction is just too excessive.
“I stress that we want Narcan in each single college,” she mentioned. “We have to carry consciousness… in order that nobody has to undergo the trauma that my household continues to undergo each single day.”