Fentanyl-Related Deaths In Riverside County Decreased By 43% Last Year

In 2021, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors created a multidisciplinary ad hoc committee to address the rapidly growing number of fentanyl-related deaths in the county.

“In the beginning, it was really our youth that brought the attention and the awareness that there was a problem,” Supervisor Karen Spiegel said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “And then, of course, all of our different departments started stepping up, and it just happened, because it needed to happen.”

And last week, the committee reported that in 2024 the number of fentanyl-related deaths in Riverside County decreased by 43%. It was the first year-over-year decline in the county since 2019.

“We have reversed the curve in Riverside County,” County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen said at the July 1 meeting. “The work, to put it simply, is working.”

Total overdose deaths in the county decreased by 28%, compared to a 25% reduction in the state and 27% across the nation.

The backbone of this work is the Riverside County Overdose Data to Action (RODA) program which allows the county to collect and analyze data to better respond. The program, run jointly by Riverside University Health System-Public Health and the Riverside County Emergency Management Department (EMD), is federally funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“This committee really enhanced our capabilities to facilitate a joint real-time monitoring program where we have the ability to strengthen what we do in community outreach and engagement, knowing when and where things are occurring,” Dan Bates, EMD director, said. “And from a quality improvement initiative, address what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and make adjustments to that.”

The data collected includes death certificates, ambulance runs, emergency room visits and calls to poison control, which allows the group to better direct the county’s resources.

“We are able to really pin down what are the age groups that are most impacted, the areas of the county [and gender],” Kim Saruwatari, Public Health director, said. “All of those things that really then dictate how we respond.”

All of this data is also made available to the public through the RODA dashboard, which displays current and historical data and can be used to help identify trends as they start.

“That multidisciplinary approach has really helped us, from an EMS perspective, transition from a very reactive system to a proactive system where we are engaging the community early,” Bates said. “We are getting out to those hard to reach populations, different areas, where we’re seeing trends and issues and really trying to make a difference before something occurs.”

Another part of that community engagement comes from Riverside University Health System-Behavioral Health, which has navigators embedded within the hospital system as part of its bridge program to help people not only start medication for addiction treatment but also connect them with community resources to continue that medication to help prevent relapse.

“We want to make sure that our community members are getting what they need,” Heidi Gomez, administrator for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Programs at Behavioral Health, said.

But Behavioral Health’s work extends far beyond assisting those with opioid use disorder and includes a number of awareness campaigns and events as well as educational programs for students. 

“Friday Night Live is a youth development program created for fourth to 12th grade students,” Gomez said. “The [school-based] chapters are led by the youth, and they focus on alcohol, tobacco and other drug prevention. That’s their mission.”

And the educational component of this multidisciplinary committee is about to grow with a new state law that requires districts to develop a curriculum to educate students about the dangers of fentanyl. That requirement doesn’t kick in until the 2026-27 school year, but because of the work done by the committee, two Riverside County school districts piloted the curriculum this past spring.

“I think what’s amazing is that while the statewide curriculum has a checklist that’s set through the Assembly bill and will be administered by the California Department of Education, the feedback that we received was how impactful the local data was,” Dominique Samario, chief strategic partnerships and communications officer for the Riverside County Office of Education, said.

Samario said students and educators from Lake Elsinore Unified and Coachella Valley Unified school districts said that because the data was so local to the students, it really showed that this is happening in their communities.

“They understand drugs are dangerous, at a kind of very general level,” she said. “But the data that we provided through the curriculum really highlighted to them that this is very serious.”

That local connection would not have been possible without the data collected by Public Health and the EMD as part of RODA, Samario said.

The final prong of this multifaceted approach is law enforcement, which has been proactive in both drug interdiction efforts and the prosecution of those allegedly responsible for fentanyl-related deaths.

“Our office was one of the first offices in the state to prosecute fentanyl-related deaths as homicides, and that began in 2021,” Amy McKenzie, communications director for the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, said. “We also had the first jury trial guilty verdict for fentanyl-related homicide.”

In practice, McKenzie said the DA’s office builds cases against accused drug dealers by showing that they knew the dangers of fentanyl and knowingly provided it to a person who subsequently took it and died. McKenzie said that holding people accountable has also aided in prevention.

“It’s been noted that there’s been some people in jail who have messaged other drug dealers like, ‘Don’t deal in Riverside County, because they will prosecute you for murder,’ so the word is out” McKenzie said. “Don’t peddle poison in Riverside County, because there are real consequences to those actions.”

Much of this work has been funded using more than $3 million in revenue from national lawsuits with pharmaceutical companies responsible for the opioid epidemic, the second installment of which is set to come back before the supervisors at a future meeting, but there is still concern about the impact of both state and federal cuts.

“We are waiting to see what happens, but not not waiting idly,” Saruwatari said. “We’re actually continuing the work, continuing to push forward, continuing the partnerships, because we all believe in this work.”