SACRAMENTO COUNTY, Calif. — The Sacramento County District Attorney's Office is warning parents and young adults to remain vigilant as dealers take a new approach to appeal to younger people with rainbow-colored fentanyl pills.
With Halloween right around the corner, the district attorney's office is also urging parents to carefully examine their kid's candy after trick-or-treating.
"They're targeting and they're marketing to young people and to children," said Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney for Sacramento County, Thien Ho. "If you're not getting the pill or the medicine from a pharmacy, then it's fake — and if it's fake, it contains fentanyl."
All it takes is two milligrams of fentanyl, equivalent to just a few grains of sand, to kill someone. Law enforcement recently made its first seizure of rainbow fentanyl pills in the Sacramento region.
In just the last two years, enough fentanyl has been seized in Sacramento County to kill more than 200,000 people, according to Ho.
"In 2021, we had 116 people die from fentanyl-related deaths, poisoning. That's more than all the gun-related homicides in the county during that same time period. Now this year, that number has gone down to 62 fentanyl-related deaths, but 62 is still 62 too many," said Ho.
Ho attributes the drop in deaths to education and public awareness campaigns like '1 Pill Can Kill,' but says there's still a lot of work that needs to be done.
"For so many of these young kids, they don't really understand how the fentanyl is being used deceptively by dealers," said Laura Didier, who lost her 17-year-old son Zach in 2020 after he purchased what he thought was Percocet.
Didier has made it her mission to educate and inform parents, teens, and young adults about the dangers of purchasing pills online. She hopes her message will have a lasting impact and save lives.
"I think my Zach's story has really resonated with a lot of these high school kids," said Didier. "Every family needs to be having these conversations. It just needs to become common knowledge for young people that, 'Of course I wouldn't take a pill that wasn't prescribed to me.'"
Didier teamed up with the 1 Pill Can Kill campaign and Arrive Alive California to host fentanyl awareness assemblies at schools across our region. They're free of charge and educators can sign their school up here.
WATCH MORE ON ABC10: Narcan distributed to all Sacramento City Unified campuses
