LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — As drug overdoses increase in southern Nevada, lawmakers passed a new law to change how the state prosecutes fentanyl possession – but there’s just one problem.
Senate Bill 35, which lawmakers passed in the final hours of the 2023 legislative session, makes trafficking a crime for amounts of fentanyl above 28 grams. The law requires a study to switch to a quantitative measure, meaning instead of a person facing a penalty for the entire amount of a substance, they would only face a fentanyl-related charge for the amount of the mixture containing fentanyl.
Not every jurisdiction has the ability to do that yet.
More than 300 people died from opioid-related overdoses in Clark County in 2022, with fentanyl the common denominator among most of them, according to the Southern Nevada Health District.
Guiseppe Mandell is more than four years sober.
“What has fentanyl meant for your family?” 8 News Now Investigator David Charns asked Mandell.
“Well, it took my brother two years ago,” Mandell said. “Unfortunately, he got some cocaine that had some fentanyl in it. He didn’t know and that was it. Trace amounts in each.”
Angelo Mandell, Guiseppe’s brother, died from a fentanyl overdose in San Francisco in 2021. Angelo, like his brother, was a recovery advocate and was sober for nearly a decade before fentanyl took his life.
“He wasn’t planning on going and doing heroin or fentanyl,” Guiseppe Mandell said. He was not either.
Guiseppe shared a photo of what he calls his low point. A former high school athlete, Guiseppe received a back injury and doctors soon prescribed him pain medication.
That later turned to heroin.
“A dealer came. She said, ‘I have heroin, I don’t have pills,’ and I said, ‘I don’t shoot up.’ And she said, ‘No — I’ll do it for you,’” Guiseppe said. “And I was so sick I just like, ‘I’ll do anything not to be this sick.’”
At rock bottom, Guiseppe was homeless, not knowing if the drugs he was ingesting, possibly laced with fentanyl, would kill him.
Just a few grains of illicit fentanyl can kill. The substance is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin and is often mixed with other products.
Several years into his sobriety, Guiseppe helps others by working in outreach to get other people into treatment.
“At least every week I hear 5 to 10 people dying and even more than that OD’ing,” he said. “Four years ago, I had never seen fentanyl and now I just hear about it nonstop.”
Frankly, fentanyl is becoming so ubiquitous that it’s in everything,” Democratic Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said. Dealers are mixing fentanyl with other substances to make their products look purer. Oftentimes, fentanyl can be laced with baby powder or other light-colored substances.
Ford wanted the trafficking penalties in the new bill to start at four grams, which amounts to just a few pills.
“What we’re endeavoring to do is make the system more precise,” he said about the new law. Changes include half a million dollars for two state-owned machines to test specific drug mixtures. The money is there from more than a billion dollars in opioid settlements Ford’s office has secured.
The machines are not.
“Is it correct to say that even though we have these standards in the law that there is no way right now in the state of Nevada to actually measure the amount of fentanyl?” Charns asked Ford.
“That’s a correct statement,” Ford said, adding the changes are meant to charge traffickers, not substance misusers.
“I think that we’re making strides,” Mandell said about lawmakers keeping up with solving the bigger problem of substance misuse. “It’s an unwinnable war. There’s no winning this war but it’s about each little battle. Sometimes I don’t realize how far I’ve come because I try to stay busy helping others.”
Opponents of Senate Bill 35 equate it with the failed War on Drugs.
In June, before the bill’s passage, lawmakers said the new machines would take a year to purchase. The bill also requires police agencies to study what tools they need and report back to the legislature.
