What should happen to drug dealers who sell drugs cut with fentanyl if those fentanyl-contaminated drugs kill those using them? Under a proposed bill called Alexandra’s Law, those drug dealers who sell drugs that kill would be charged with murder when their drugs kill.
The bill is backed and promoted by Matt Capelouto. His daughter, Alexandra, the girl for whom the bill is named, was found dead in her bedroom after an accidental fentanyl overdose. That horrific tragedy occurred in 2019, and now Mr. Capelouto is lobbying for the passage of the bill to help law enforcement officers hold “death dealers” accountable.
California Democrats struck down the bill in April, but Mr. Capelouto is still working to get it passed. To raise support for the bill and stop drug dealers who kill from being able to “get away with murder,” he recently appeared on Wednesday’s broadcast of “America Reports.”
During that appearance, he said, “It really starts at the local level. When law enforcement shows up at one of these drug deaths, the very first thing that needs to be done, is it needs to be treated as a crime, treated, a crime scene, needs to be sealed off and treated as and investigated as a homicide.”
Continuing, Mr. Capelouto argued that because the “poison” drugs resulted in death, the selling of them should be a crime and those who sell them need to be held accountable so that the streets are ridded of the “death dealers.”
In his words: “The first thing is, is recognizing that there’s a crime here, somebody delivered a poison that resulted in somebody’s death. And then on top of that most of our states, California leading the way, have terrible laws in terms of holding these death dealers accountable. So we need better laws to back up law enforcement and we need law enforcement to investigate the cases criminally so we can go after the death dealers and get them off the streets.”
Continuing, he argued that even though the state Democrats struck down the law, many district attorney offices see it as a “valuable tool” that would help them fight back against poisonous narcotics and those who deal such drugs. He added that there is still time to get the law passed before the legislative session is over.
Speaking on that, he said, “We are trying to get him to support Alexandra’s Law. The majority of our district attorneys across our state see this as a valuable tool. It’s still possible for our law to get passed in this year’s legislative session and we think we would have a greater chance of it passed if the attorney general in California would come out in support of it. To date, he has not come out in support of a single piece of legislation that holds these drug dealers accountable for the deaths they are causing.”
He then noted that though fighting back against drug smuggling and defending the border is critical, fighting drug dealers at home is equally so. In his words: “But [border security is] just one link in the chain. If we can’t even stop the drug dealers right here in our own communities, how do we expect to deal with China and Mexico for their role in this?”
Ending, he argued that current enforcement policies let drug dealers get away with murder, turning people that could be taken off the streets for good into serial killers allowed by the state to keep making money off of death and misery.
As he put it: “People have this misconception that we are locking up all these drug dealers yet we still have all the drug deaths. Really nothing can be further from the truth. Less than 1% of all drug deaths result in the conviction of a drug dealer. So, literally we are letting these drug dealers get away with murder and if they are dealing fentanyl, we have allowed them to become serial killers. They’ll continue dealing and taking lives of innocent victims, just like my daughter.”
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