Wine Country Times

The Sonoma County District Attorney's Office has been awarded a $340,000 federal grant to fight the opioid epidemic by Bureau of Justice Assistance, which is a wing of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), a press release stated.

DOJ describes the grant as an “innovative prosecution solution,” to a growing health crisis in the United States which "local prosecutors’ offices struggle to effectively adjust to the growing amount of evidence and the subsequent intricacies of the investigation and prosecution of crimes, particularly cyber, human trafficking, gun and drug crimes," the press release said. 

Sonoma County has reportedly struggled in its battle against opioids, in particular, fentanyl, which killed a 13-month old child who came into contact with the drug due to his father, who too overdoses on the drug and died shortly after. Authorities have concluded that the drug was purchased in San Francisco's tenderloin district and was transported to Santa Rosa for sale. 

In total, opioids account for a large percentage of overdose related deaths, including 72 deaths in 2018, 77 in 2019 and another 15 deaths within the first two months of 2020, pointing to a wider and continuous crisis local authorities have struggled to address, hence the grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. 

According to the California Opioid Overdose Surveillance Dashboard, the number of opioid related deaths in Sonoma is markedly higher than the rest of California at 9.8 per 100,000 residents in 2018, which 70% higher than the rest of the state at 5.82 per 100,000 for the same year. 

“The danger to public safety posed by these highly addictive and oftentimes deadly substances cannot be taken lightly. All available resources, from education to treatment to prosecution, need to be employed to combat the prevalence of opioid abuse in our community," District Attorney Jill Ravitch said in the release.