Four years ago I stood up at a Board meeting and said something a lot of people in county government were not ready to hear. Fentanyl is not a drug problem. It is a poisoning.
Kids in our county were dying from a single pill they thought was something else. In 2021, twelve San Diegans under the age of 17 died that way. The youngest was thirteen years old.
I told you then that we were going to treat it like the poison it is. I want to tell you where that stands, because last week the County released numbers I have been waiting four years to see.
In 2025, 840 San Diegans died of an overdose. That is down 11 percent from the year before, and down 36 percent from the peak of 1,309 deaths in 2021. Four straight years of decline. Fentanyl-caused deaths have fallen from 802 in 2022 to 340 last year.
Every one of those 840 is still somebody’s kid, somebody’s parent, somebody’s neighbor. But roughly 470 people are alive today who would not have been at the 2021 rate. That is what progress looks like when you actually do the work.
Here is what we did.
In June of 2022, I brought forward the action to declare illicit fentanyl a public health crisis in San Diego County. It passed unanimously. That was the first step, putting the public formally on notice that this was killing more people aged 18 to 45 than car accidents, heart disease or guns.
That October, the Board approved our push to require fentanyl education in county schools and to get Narcan into them. If our kids were going to be handed these pills, they were going to know what they were holding.
We partnered with District Attorney Summer Stephan on town halls for parents and a countywide awareness campaign built around four words. One pill can kill.
None of that was about headlines. It was about a thirteen-year-old who did not know.
So whether next year’s numbers keep falling or not, the job is the same.
Talk to your kids. Not the lecture. The real conversation, the one where you say out loud that a pill from a friend or off an app is not the pill they think it is.
And know that the treatment door is open. Call the County’s Access and Crisis Line at 888-724-7240, any hour, any day.
I am in my final year on this Board. Of everything we have taken on in District 5, this is the one I will think about longest, because the wins are invisible. They are the phone calls that never came.
If you or your family need help finding resources, my office will help you find them. Call us at 619-531-5555 or email jim.desmond@sdcounty.ca.
Thank you for letting me serve you.
San Diego County District 5 Supervisor Jim Desmond
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