by Elka Worner
“People want to know, ‘Is it really that bad or is it something that happens in back alleys?’ I hate to say it, but no. It’s extremely prevalent right here in our Beach Cities and in the South Bay,” Hermosa Beach Police Chief Paul LeBaron said at a Beach Cities Health District community forum to raise awareness about the fentanyl crisis. The forum was held February 9 at the Redondo Union High School Auditorium.
Between 2016 and 2021, the South Bay recorded 529 fentanyl deaths, including 114 people under the age of 25, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
After a young Hermosa Beach man died of a fentanyl overdose in 2020, the department launched an investigation into fentanyl dealers.
“We were buying the stuff easily by just logging on anonymously to social media platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Cash App, Snapchat, Telegram, stuff you go on every single day,” Chief LeBaron said. “We anonymously got on there and found people and they brought it to us immediately.”
The investigation led to the arrest of five people, four adults and one juvenile, and the seizure of about 2,400 pills that tested positive for fentanyl.
“This isn’t like you have to go to a back alley anymore,” said Sebastian Martin, Director of Recovery at New Life House, a South Bay rehabilitation facility. “They will bring it to your home.”
More than 150 people die in the United States each day from overdoses related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl, the National Center on Health Statistics said. Fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin, “is often added to other drugs because of its extreme potency, which makes drugs cheaper, more powerful, more addictive, and more dangerous,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
LeBaron said fentanyl is “killing people who don’t intend to take the drug.” While it might be counterintuitive for drug dealers to kill their own clients, “they don’t care,” he said. It costs 13 cents to make a fentanyl pill, which dealers can then sell on the street for $30.
“If someone dies there are plenty more waiting,” the chief said.
“Educate. Educate. Make people aware. Make them understand so we can have conversations with our children, our young adults and adults,” said Dr. Moe Gelbart, Director of Behavioral Health at Torrance Memorial Medical Center.
He said as a country, we need to change the “paradigm that leads children to experiment with drugs.”
“It has to become ‘No experimenting,’” he said. “I know that sounds harsh and for some people, unrealistic.”
“We have to take away the sense that everybody does it, all my friends are doing it. It’s okay,” he said.
Martin, who helps recovering drug addicts, said cannabis, while legal and readily available in California, is a gateway drug to more experimentation.
“Experimentation…those days have to come to an end,” he said.
Part of the problem, he said, is that substance use is “prevalent in the music young people listen to, the shows that they’re watching.”
Redondo Union High School junior Robert Acevedo said his mom brought him to the community forum.
“I honestly was pretty interested too because I always heard about the drug fentanyl,” he said. “Tonight definitely informed me a lot.”
The forum included a screening of the documentary “Dead on Arrival,” a gut wrenching documentary about parents whose children had been “poisoned” or “murdered” by fentanyl.
“It really opened my eyes to look out for that stuff. It could be the smallest grain of it,” Acevedo said of the drug.
The high school student said he will share what he learned with his friends. ER
