A parade of anguished parents clutching portraits of their dead children filed solemnly past the lawmakers. There was Alexandra and Adrian, Jessica and Amanda, Alex and Elijah and Adrianna and so very many more, their smiles forever frozen in two dimensions.
It was March, and these parents beseeched Sacramento lawmakers — for the third time — to pass a new law that might spare others their unbearable pain. This bipartisan bill would have simply required courts to issue warnings to convicted fentanyl dealers that their fake Oxycontin or Xanax et al. pills can kill — and that if they keep selling drugs and someone dies from a fentanyl overdose as a result, they could be prosecuted for homicide.
At the front of the line of bereaved parents, as he so often is, was Matt Capelouto. “Alexandra’s Law,” as it was called, was named after his daughter, who thought she was taking Percocet and died from fentanyl poisoning a few days before Christmas in Temecula in 2019. The bill was freakish in that it had 41 authors and coauthors from both sides of the aisle. When the Senate public safety committee sent the bill to its demise, again, Capelouto went ballistic.
“This is a disgusting display of a legislative committee holding hostage 40 million people and their safety and security, all in the name of political, ideological gameplay,” he fumed. “What all of us want here is to protect people from the enduring, the never-ending pain of someone being killed by a drug dealer selling poison. And they won’t do it. They won’t even pass a bill that contains a warning — a freaking warning.”
So, Capelouto and company are taking this fight to the ballot box. They’ve filed a proposed ballot initiative with the state attorney general that would do what the legislature would not. Alexandra’s Law is awaiting a title and summary from the AG — a process that has, at times, lent itself to accusations of partisanship — after which would come the…
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