Orange County (California) Supervisor Doug Chaffee told The Epoch Times that the fentanyl crisis has become so severe that nowadays buying the drug "is almost as easy as ordering an Uber."
You can order takeout on your iPhone. You can order an Uber. Now, if you have the right app, you can order fentanyl (...) It's almost as easy as ordering an Uber (...) You can see what an incredible crisis this is becoming.
Chaffee explained that many young people buy the drug from an anonymous dealer through social media:
You don't have to contact your favorite drug dealer on the street. You can actually order it now through your iPhone. And so that’s what our youth do.
Fentanyl seized in county would kill entire population 30 times over
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) states that fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is "50 times more potent than heroin" and "100 times more potent than morphine." Chaffee stated:
A pill will kill (...) Something as small as two grains of sand of fentanyl will kill you.
The supervisor reported that county officers seized nearly 550 pounds of the deadly opioid in 2022. This amount is equivalent to more than 100 million lethal doses and is enough to kill the entire county 30 times over (3.1 million people):
When you consider the population of Orange County is 3.1 million, we could kill everyone here 30 times over.
In 2016, there were 37 fentanyl deaths in Orange County. That number increased to 717 in 2021 reaffirming the severity of the crisis.
