Latino communities mobilize amid a rise in fentanyl-related deaths

Editor’s note: This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. It is part of our Safe to Learn investigative series, exploring how communities define safety for their children and what those children need in order to develop their full potential in and out of the classroom.

This story may contain scenes or references that could be triggering. If you or someone you know needs mental health support, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988. Crisis counselors are available in English and Spanish, as well as for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

By Aitana Vargas | Edited by Ruben Castaneda

When 16-year-old Daniel Joseph Puerta-Johnson died of fentanyl poisoning at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in April 2020, his father, Jaime Puerta, was unaware of how pervasive fentanyl poisoning, overdoses and deaths had become among adults and youth nationwide. That year alone, this powerful, highly addictive synthetic drug — which is also legally prescribed for certain medical conditions — and other opioids were responsible for an estimated 74.8% of all 93,655 drug-related deaths in the U.S. Three years later, drug overdoses killed 107,543 people and fentanyl and other opioids were responsible for 75.4% of those.

While there is no guaranteed solution in sight, parents, school districts, local, state and federal government officials and legislators across the country are scrambling to find effective strategies to mitigate the death and societal destruction fentanyl is inflicting on families and communities nationwide.

Daniel’s father feels authorities aren’t doing enough.

“Fentanyl poisoning is killing more people than suicide. It’s killing more people than gun violence. It’s killing more people than car accidents, but yet we’re sitting here scratching our heads,” says Puerta.

Available data confirms his assertion: 48,204 people died of gun-related deaths in 2022, according to the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts website. Of those, 56% were suicides. Car accidents killed 42,514 people and fentanyl overdoses amounted to 84,181 that year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

However, a September 2024 report by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, whose authors analyzed 2022 data, revealed that gun violence remains the leading cause of death among U.S. children and teens up to 17 years old, as it has been since 2020. In just 2022, gun violence, which disproportionately affects Black youth, claimed the lives of 2,526 children and teens.

Like gun violence, deaths caused by fentanyl are exacting an enormous toll on Latino parents. The statistics tell part of the story; they don’t quantify the searing grief and the emotional toll such deaths have on parents and families who have lost a child or loved one to fentanyl.

It never occurred to Puerta that his son would become a statistic when doctors diagnosed him with severe depression and ADHD. “He was receiving medical treatment, doing well, and wasn’t using alcohol and drugs,” says Puerta. “But the pandemic hit, and we feel that, you know, it really put him in a very dark place.”

To escape isolation and darkness, Daniel turned to self-medication. He used Snapchat — which leaves no trace of conversations — to connect to a drug dealer, who sold him what looked like a legitimate Oxycodone pill. Unknown to the teen, it contained about six to eight milligrams of fentanyl, authorities said. That amount could kill up to four adults. For Daniel, that one pill was lethal. “So many children are dying through no fault of their own,” Puerta says. “They die through deception.”

Counterfeit prescription pills, such as oxycodone, benzodiazepines and others, laced with fentanyl — known as blues or fentapills — can be deadly. A UCLA Health report released this year showed that, on average, 22 teenagers between 14 and 18 died each week in the U.S. in 2022.

Following Daniel’s death, his father co-founded Victims of Illicit Drugs (VOID), a nonprofit that uplifts the Latino community in California and the U.S. by going into schools to educate students about the dangers of drugs. One way it does this is by showing Dead on Arrival, a 21-minute documentary by Dominic Tierno and Christine Wood. The film, available in English and Spanish, recounts the stories of four families, including Puerta’s, who have lost loved ones to fentanyl.

Puerta strives to bring drug prevention information to students attending junior high schools and high schools in Los Angeles to ensure they are adequately equipped to navigate potential periods of stress and anxiety. Ultimately, he wants to detract students from turning to social media platforms in search of drugs to alleviate mental health struggles.

His nonprofit partners with the Los Angeles Police Department. Unlike some parents and organizations, he supports the presence of school resource officers (SROs) on campus and believes that police view their role as protecting children, not finding reasons to arrest them.

The Advancement Project, a nonprofit devoted to dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline and removing law enforcement presence and SROs from schools, views police officers as a threat to Black, Brown and Latino students. They also say police are the wrong vessels for a drug prevention message.

“When you place a police officer in a school, you increase the likelihood…of suspensions and expulsions, and you increase the risk of school-based arrests, as well as the physical assaults that accompany that,” says Tyler Whittenberg, deputy director of the project’s Opportunity to Learn program.

In the 1980s, the LAPD’s D.A.R.E. program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) placed police officers in schools and “it was measurably ineffective at preventing students from experimenting with drugs,” Whittenberg says.

Scholarly research supports Whittenberg’s claim. But the long-ago program’s merits are immaterial to Puerta and other parents who have lost a loved one to fentanyl. These parents have no illusion that their efforts will stop or solve the crisis – but they’re galvanized by their respective losses to try to mitigate the toll fentanyl is exacting on their communities.

Following the death of 15-year-old Melanie Ramos in September 2022, a group of parents — including Melanie’s mother, Elena Pérez — and community leaders contributed to the October 2023 passage of SB 10 or Melanie’s Law, a statewide bill requiring all California public schools to develop safety plans and create fentanyl education, prevention training and response programs for staff, students and families. The goal: to save an overdosing student.

The teenager had fatally overdosed in the girls’ bathroom at Bernstein High School in Hollywood, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Earlier that day, a friend of Melanie’s overdosed at the school but survived. Both girls had taken pills they thought were Percocet. The pills were laced with fentanyl, according to published reports.

Melanie’s mother filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the LAUSD, arguing school officials knew there was a “rampant drug problem on the Bernstein campus,” including overdoses in recent months, yet failed to act. Authorities confirmed that at least seven teenagers in Hollywood had overdosed on pills believed to be laced with fentanyl in the span of a month. The LAUSD is now trying to have the case dismissed.

The bill was sponsored by state Sen. Dave Cortese (District 15), who represents most of Santa Clara County, which saw an 863% increase in fentanyl deaths between 2018 and 2021. The legislation also provides schools with access to Narcan (Naloxone), an emergency nasal spray that rapidly reverses the effects of fentanyl.

“Having Narcan at schools will save lives,” says Mira Parwiz, coalition leader of the Santa Clara County Opioid Overdose Prevention Project (SCCOOPP), a diverse group of healthcare professionals and volunteers working to promote opioid safety throughout the county.

Parwiz explains that, faced with skyrocketing overdoses in Santa Clara — where 25% of the population is Latino — the county had no time to spare. In 2022, SCCOOPP provided opioid education and training to all school districts and made Narcan available to each school’s staff, parents and students. “Senator Cortese has told us that he was inspired by our work and pushed it forward to become a model for all California schools,” she adds.

SB 10’s effectiveness remains unclear. In Santa Clara County, authorities have yet to track whether the law made a difference. However, Parwiz is sure the measure will help all schools, regardless of socioeconomic factors.

Other tools used by SCCOOPP include screenings of the feature-length documentary Fentanyl High at community events and schools. The film was directed by Kyle Santoro, a Taiwanese-American student at Los Gatos High School.

Youth and young adults join the drug prevention effort

Santoro is not the only student or young adult raising awareness of the dangers of opioid addiction. In Arizona, 31-year-old Ronny Morales has been working as a recovery advocate for years now. A former Arizona State University journalism student, Morales quit his college studies after developing a years-long addiction to prescription opiates following a car accident that left him with third-degree burns. After only three months of supervised treatment, he developed a drug dependency. “I started using it like my coffee in the morning,” he says in an interview with palabra.

In the throes of his addiction, Morales went to social media, where he found “abuelitas” who sold him medication from the comfort of their own homes. “You would see them…you would be like, oh, she’s such a cute grandma… but…they get down to business,” Morales explains.

In 2019, he started sharing his recovery journey on social media and realized that he was not alone in his struggle with opiates or fentanyl. He has since brought his message to students and parents at community and recovery events. But it’s been an uphill recovery journey, and as a Latino, he says, it was “embarrassing” to share his struggles with others.

“Because of the cultural differences, culture barriers, it’s just so much more difficult to come out with something like that (fentanyl addiction) and be public about it. It’s very taboo,” he says.

Morales relapsed multiple times until he cut off all contact with his drug providers and network and became sober in 2019. This decision appears to have been crucial in his recovery journey.

“I blocked them. I deleted them. I wanted nothing to do with them. I didn’t want them to reach out to me because I wanted just no connection with them,” he says.

Cartels recruit young U.S. citizens and permanent residents to smuggle drugs

Both in Arizona and California, Mexican cartels — primarily the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel — are exploiting decades-long logistics and distribution routes to smuggle fentanyl into the U.S. It is not immigrants without documents bringing in the drugs, as president-elect Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly. Rather, drug organizations enlist U.S. citizens and green card holders — including some students — as “mules” to slip fentanyl past the border.

In August 2019, Phillip Junior Webb, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced to 46 months in prison for recruiting high school students and attempting to smuggle methamphetamine and fentanyl at the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa ports of entry multiple times. At the time of the offense, Webb was an 18-year-old high school senior. Juveniles he recruited strapped drugs to their bodies, according to the DEA.

At least 50% of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s fentanyl seizures occur in San Diego. This means that students in school districts on or close to the border — such as those in San Ysidro, National City, and Chula Vista — are particularly vulnerable to recruitment by drug organizations, which offer to pay thousands of dollars for smuggling drugs into the U.S.

The legal entry points of Tijuana and San Ysidro are “the most valuable piece of drug trafficking property in the world,” says Rocky Herron, a retired DEA agent currently working as the ambassador of Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention for the San Diego County Office of Education. Herron, parent of three daughters, spoke to palabra on behalf of himself, not as a spokesman for the county education department.

Herron speaks fluent Spanish and has delivered nearly a thousand presentations in the U.S. and over 200 abroad. His message to youth is simple: the power to make the right choices — even if one is already using drugs — resides within them. In his talks, he also explains that drug consumption disrupts brain development and has negative consequences for the user’s friends and family.

Herron works on prevention campaigns with school districts on the border that have a mix of U. S. and transborder Mexican students.

While fentanyl deaths are getting the lion’s share of attention, methamphetamine is also fatally poisoning many people, he says.

The toll exacted by both drugs is quantifiable. According to a 2024 annual report card, unintentional fentanyl-caused deaths (both prescribed and illicitly obtained) rose from 151 to 749 between 2019 and 2023 in San Diego. Fentanyl-only deaths accounted for 62% of all unintentional drug and alcohol deaths in 2023. In 2019, this number was considerably lower: 23%. In 2023 also, the explosive methamphetamine and fentanyl mix killed 458 people, compared to 56 in 2019.

Herron acknowledges that it’s hard to prove the effectiveness of preventive care: “How do you prove how many drug users you prevented?”

Beatriz Villarreal also believes in the power of preventive strategies. More than 25 years ago, Villarreal — who at the time was running an advisory program at the San Diego County Juvenile Hall — founded Mano a Mano, a San Diego-based non-profit working with the police, state universities, public schools and churches to bring drug prevention information exclusively in Spanish to Latino children and families in San Diego County. She wants parents to start the war on drugs at home, takes a hard stance on crime and believes that dealers, including students, have to face serious consequences for committing drug-related crimes.

Online videos of her presentations show Villarreal encouraging Latino parents to have frequent conversations about drug and alcohol prevention with their children. She shows parents how to visually identify drugs, teaches them street drug names, explains how prevalent specific drugs are in different regions, breaks down popular drug use by ethnic group and describes the effects of each drug on the body.

There are signs that prevention efforts and calls to action — like Herron’s and Puerta’s talks, the students’ awareness efforts, Villarreal’s classes and the widespread availability of naloxone — may be having a positive effect among students and parents attending these events.

Villarreal launched her fentanyl prevention campaign in Spanish about two years ago, encouraged Puerta to include Spanish subtitles on Dead on Arrival, and currently provides free Narcan to families attending her events. Multiple times, she has invited Puerta to speak and screen his short film on fentanyl. This year, he spoke before an audience of 2,500 students. The response was overwhelming.

“All (attendees) ended up crying and hugged him. And that’s what we need, that he goes to each school and presents his video,” she recalls.

Aitana Vargas is a Columbia University graduate and an award-winning on-camera foreign correspondent and live tennis commentator based in Los Angeles. She began her career anchoring a local Spanish-language TV show while obtaining her BS in Physics from Berry College and then interned at the BBC, CNN International, and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Communications Department in Germany. Her Master’s thesis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Columbia University was supervised by Professor Rashid Khalidi. Her stories have appeared on NPR’s The Pulse, the EHRP, Público, EFE, CNN Expansión, the LA Times, DirecTV Sports, TVE Internacional, Cuatro/Telecinco TV Network, HITN TV Network, Narratively, Hoy Los Ángeles and others. She’s received several LA Press Club awards (Investigative Series, Sports Journalist of the Year, Race & Society Reporting, Hard News Feature, Obituary, Consumer Reporting, Sports and Hard News) and the 2018 Berry College Outstanding Young Alumni Award. She is a Livingston Award finalist, a Fundación Gabo & Organized Crime Corruption Reporting Project finalist and a 2024-2025 Rosalynn Carter fellow. Aitana was also the Spanish-English interpreter for transgender artist Daniela Vega, lead actress in the Academy Award-winning film “A Fantastic Woman.” Learn more about her. @AitanaVargas

Zaydee Sanchez is a Mexican American visual storyteller, documentary photographer, and writer from Tulare, California, in the San Joaquin Valley. She seeks to highlight underreported communities and overlooked narratives, with a focus on labor, gender, and displacement. Zaydee is an International Women’s Media Foundation grantee and a 2021 USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Fellow. Her work has been published in Al Jazeera, National Geographic, NPR, among others. She lives in Los Angeles. @Zaydee_s

Ruben Castaneda is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist with more than three decades of experience as a reporter and an editor. He has worked for the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and is the author of the book S Street Rising: Crack, Murder and Redemption in D.C. @sstreetrising