Sonoma County DA’s anti-fentanyl ad campaign faulted for fake scenario and misleading information

Last fall, Sonoma County District Attorney Carla Rodriguez pushed a public service campaign about the dangers of fentanyl, the potent opioid responsible for more than ten thousand overdose deaths statewide.

But while the drug can indeed be deadly, the DA’s office paid for public service announcements that described fake overdose scenarios experts say are unlikely and further misinformation about the drug.

The DA’s office pulled one radio spot this week after an inquiry by a reporter for Northern California Public Media, which first reported on the campaign in a story aired Wednesday. The ad featured the death of a fictional six-year-old who supposedly touched fentanyl powder in a public park.

“That’s all she did,” an actress portraying the girl’s mother says in the spot. From there, the actress portrays her daughters collapse and death. “She then fell down and made this gurgling noise and then went limp,” she says.

Listen: The audio of the now-removed radio spot ad funded by the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office, which was provided to The Press Democrat by California Newsroom reporter Brian Krans.

The radio spot never discloses that it’s a dramatization. And the scenario described — a child overdosing after touching fentanyl powder found on the ground in a park — is not plausible. According to Northern California Public Media’s report, the agency paid $46,000 to Amaturo Sonoma Media Group, which owns local radio stations including talk-radio station KSRO, to produce the radio ads.

An Amaturo executive did not immediately return calls for comment Thursday.

The company is not affiliated with Sonoma Media Investments, the parent company of The Press Democrat, which also ran digital and print ads in the campaign.

Those ads — which directed readers to the website managed by the DA's office — did not describe fictional scenarios, but pictured small piles of fentanyl — an amount tiny enough to fit on the sharpened tip of a pencil, for example — that could be fatal if ingested by someone without a tolerance for the drug.

As fentanyl continues to claim the lives of intentional users and those who consume it by accident, often because it is mixed into other drugs like cocaine, public health experts say law enforcement agencies have often crossed over the line from educating the public to generating false fears.

Medical experts and toxicologists have become increasingly vocal about at tendency by law enforcement agencies to spread alarming misinformation about the drug’s dangers.

“This money, this time, this ad campaign could have been used on actual education,” said Dr. Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist and professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

“The need to fear monger and focus on misinformation really detracts from doing something meaningful that could have an actual impact on overdoses,” he said.

Rodriguez on Wednesday told The Press Democrat her department wanted to put out accurate information but did not find too much fault in the radio ad. That particular ad never aired on the radio, she said, though it was available online.

But, “if the worst thing I do as District Attorney is raise awareness about the dangers of opioids and fentanyl then I feel like I’m ahead of the game,“ she said.

Last November, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook that a deputy had experienced a potential overdose after collecting fentanyl found at a gas station. Medical experts told The Press Democrat that was extremely unlikely.

Experts like Marino worry that overblown fears of dying by merely touching fentanyl could give first responders or others pause when responding to a person actually in the midst of an overdose. Lifesaving aid has been delayed as people seal off a room or wait to get ahold of hazmat gear, while bystanders have been afraid to check on someone who could be overdosing, Marino said.

And as insidiously, he said, spreading false information about the drug’s dangers and impacts can drive bad policy and harmful sentencing practices.

“The science is very clear — this isn’t like an opinion debate — and this keeps happening over and over again,“ he said.

Rodriguez said that a child dying from fentanyl exposure was not just a scary scenario but has been reality in Sonoma county.

“We’ve seen it here,” she said. “If a child is touching fentanyl and then they touch their eyes or their mouth they could die,” she added.

A toddler died in Sonoma County in 2022 from acute fentanyl intoxication, and Rodriguez’s attorneys are prosecuting the parents of the girl, who was 15-months old when she died, on charges of murder and child endangerment. A Sonoma County judge recently postponed a jury trial in that case. The parties reappear in court on Monday and could set a new trial date.

Investigators in that case say the child likely ingested the fentanyl in the manner Rodriguez described — by touching powder and then putting her hands into her mouth or on her eyes.

Still, in that case the parents were fentanyl users with 2.7 grams of fentanyl in their home and powder scattered on a nightstand, unlike in the fictional radio ad.

“I’m not aware of anyone stumbling across piles of fentanyl in public parks,” Rodriguez said.

Another one of the radio ads opens with a dialogue between a young man and an unidentified other speaker. The unidentified voice, presumably a being of the afterlife, explains to the young man that he is in heaven, having passed on after sipping from a drink a girl gave him at a party.

"You know that drink? It was laced with fentanyl,“ the unidentified speaker tells him, and it killed him.

Marino described that scenario as equally implausible, and based in a harmful stigma about drug users that ignores the science of addiction — along the lines of baseless reports about fentanyl laced candies proliferating around Halloween.

“It implies that people using fentanyl are malicious murderers and that’s not the case,” he said, “that’s not how drugs work.” While fentanyl can be taken orally, it has to be taken in much higher doses, Marino said, which is why most users of the drug smoke, snort or inject it.

“People are not spiking drinks at parties and you would have to use a lot of fentanyl in a drink to do that,” he said. “If you apply any sort of logic or critical thinking it makes no sense for a number of reasons.”

Rodriguez said she had not seen any reports of fentanyl-laced beverages in Sonoma County to date.

As concerning, Marino said, is a section of the ad where the voice from the afterlife tells the young man that his death came even though his friend had the overdose-reversing drug Narcan. The voice tells him that “when it comes to fentanyl,” Narcan doesn’t work, or at least not always.

Fentanyl, like other synthetic opioids, can be reversed by naloxone, the lifesaving drug marketed as Narcan, Marino said. “They all respond to similar doses of naloxone,” he said. Narcan is available over the counter in California.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to indicate fentanyl is responsible for more than ten thousand overdose deaths statewide. -Ed.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on X (Twitter) @AndrewGraham88