Public Space 4

Blues

During the summer of 2020, the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic, I watched a silent, unspoken, and completely different epidemic plague my hometown. This epidemic was only seen by a few and escaped by fewer but had drastic effects on those caught in its path. This plague was the migration of thousands of fentanyl pills up and down the California Coast, raining into towns like the COVID-19 virus and claiming lives all the same. I watched as these pills silently infect my town hooking the rich, poor, and middle class, and destroying lives along the way. Fentanyl pills were unique in the way in which they spread on the street from my understanding of them. Up to 2019, my senior year of high school, I had never seen them or heard of anyone using them. However, right around graduation, I started hearing about friends taking Percocet which I thought was weird but not abnormal. That summer it continued but it was never my closest friends and it was strangely confidential as if there was some secrecy around these Percocets and not something everyone should be trying. I left town and went away for my freshmen year of college that August and didn't return until the COVID-19 pandemic sent me back in March of 2020. When I got home I was shocked and discovered two of my friends ripped into the abyss of a fentanyl addiction and stories of others who had fallen off the map around my town. Essentially, a fentanyl pill is a pill that is created to take the shape and look like an over-the-counter pharmaceutical pill, however instead of containing expected pharmaceutical powers it contains fentanyl. Some fentanyl addicts knew this, some dealers knew this, but many did not. My friends were some of the many who thought they were taking true prescription percocets however, they were being unknowingly dosed with Fentynal. These magical Percocets appeared on drug dealers' Snapchats around Southern California, in reality, were Fentynal pills, manufactured by cartels in Mexico and addicting an unknowing audience. SoCal was the testing ground for this new drug and it spread like wildfire. Drug enforcement up and down the cost never fully understood this epidemic and it wasn't until people started dying from overdoses that they began to combat it. But by that time it was too late as kids my age were already hooked after a handful of times doing it. The next generation of fentanyl addicts was born and it tore away lives that were just beginning to flourish. To my knowledge, current kids in my hometown mostly stay away from blues now because they know they have fentanyl and have no interest in becoming a 19-year-old tweaker. Furthermore, it appears the market for Fentynal pills has shrunk because its user base has shrunk. Many blessed with money or strong family support have been in rehab fighting their addiction with professionals, many of them moved away and tried to start new lives, and unfortunately many have overdosed and are no longer here. Luckily my two friends deep in the claws of the beast were able to break free and come back to us and I believe like Covid-19, this worst part of this plague has passed.