Back in 2021, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office received a $340,000 federal grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance to target opioid-related crimes. One of the things that District Attorney Carla Rodriguez used that money for was a series of anti-fentanyl public service announcements.
Seven of these ads were produced last fall, but one, titled Lindsay’s Story never made it to the airwaves at all and has been pulled from the DA’s website following an inquiry from California Newsroom.
And it went a little something like this.
Announcer: This is Lisa.
Lisa: She was a great kid. She loved horses. She wanted to play soccer
Announcer: and like many Sonoma County moms that afternoon she had taken her daughter to the playground.
Lisa: We’d gone to the park that day and you know how kids are. She saw some white powder and touched it. That’s all she did… All of a sudden, something just wasn’t right. Her pupils look like little dots.
Lisa: She then fell down and made this gurgling noise and then went limp.
Listeners are then directed to the website SOCO one pill can kill dot com.
Lisa: She was only six years old.
Announcer: This message is brought to you by the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office
Lisa: Six years old.
You see, the problem is … not only is there no record of this ever having happened, it is not physically possible for it to have happened.
But while the ad has been removed, no one involved feels even a little bad about it.
Via Northern California Public Media:
According to records we requested, the DA’s office contracted with Amaturo Sonoma Media Group. They own several commercial radio stations in the area, including KSRO talk radio, which has featured Rodriguez and real parents who have actually lost kids to fentanyl. […]
The DA’s office paid Amaturo $46,000 dollars for help with the campaign. That included the company producing several radio spots with some of the parents interviewed on KSRO, and running them on its nine stations for six weeks.
Steve DiNardo is Amaturo’s VP of sales. He said ‘Lindsey’s Story’ never aired on the radio, and admits it was fabricated.
“We were trying to be creative,” [DiNardo] said. “We’re trying to elicit emotion. I think the campaign did a very good job of accomplishing that.”
Emails we obtained show that DA Rodriguez was personally involved in creating the public service campaign, but she told us ‘Lindsey’s Story’ was entirely Amaturo’s creation.
“It is not based on a true story,” Rodriguez said.
We asked the DA if she had any concerns about the fake story being alarmist.
“I am not concerned about people being too alert about the dangers of fentanyl,” Rodriguez said. “Period. I am not.”
But telling lies doesn’t help anyone become “alert about the dangers of fentanyl,” because your six-year-old overdosing in the park by touching fentanyl is not one of the dangers of fentanyl.
The thing is, when something is as dangerous as fentanyl, when there are, tragically, so many true stories about people overdosing and dying from fentanyl, “getting creative” is unnecessary — and offensive. There is no need to add any sauce to that. According to Rodriguez’s website, 109 people in Sonoma County died in 2021 from fentanyl overdoses. Were their true stories just not enough to “elicit emotion”? Because if so, that’s messed up.
Now — I can understand, cognitively, why people told ridiculous lies about marijuana. They really, really, really, for whatever reason, did not want people to smoke pot but the actual truth about it just wasn’t all that scary. The anti-drug people had to be like, “Oh hey, if you smoke pot, you’re gonna end up drinking broken glass and doing heroin!” because “You might sit on the couch and eat a whole bag of Cool Ranch Doritos” just didn’t hit the same.
But it backfired! Because then people smoked pot, did not drink broken glass or axe-murder their entire family or do heroin or any other such thing, and then perhaps didn’t believe those same drug warriors in cases where they might have been telling the truth. Because hey! If they’re lying about pot, maybe they’re also lying about heroin.
This is not the case with fentanyl. (I’m referring only to the kind you get off the street, it’s obviously different in an actual medical setting with people who know what they’re doing, for things like advanced cancer pain.) I mean, sure — there are people who have taken it without dropping dead, just as there was that one lady who fell 30,000 feet without a parachute and didn’t die, but neither is a risk anyone should want to take. Fentanyl is legitimately dangerous, but it’s not going to kill a kid who accidentally touches something with fentanyl on it because that is not how the drug works.
The government shouldn’t be paying people to lie to you about it. Barring that, if they’re caught, they should at least have the decency to be embarrassed.
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