PHOENIX (CN) — Ashley Dunn lay in a hospital bed on life support for three days before her mother gave the OK to pull the plug. Before that, she lay for 30 minutes on her apartment floor while her roommate waited to call 911. Before that, the 26-year-old from Prescott Valley bought what she thought was an oxycodone pill from a Glendale resident, who drove 97 miles to deliver it.
“She killed my child,” Ashley’s mother, Josephine Dunn, said to a group of Arizona lawmakers Monday afternoon.
Ashley Dunn died of a fentanyl overdose in 2021, along with 2,015 others in Arizona, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. Last year, 1,658 Arizonans died from an overdose involving the synthetic opioid, which the Center for Disease Prevention and Control says is 50-100 times more powerful than morphine. More than 3,000 suffered non-fatal overdoses in the same year.
The deaths in Arizona reflect a nationwide crisis. More than 56,000 Americans died overdosing on fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2020, the CDC reported, and the numbers continue to rise. Sheriffs from both Yavapai and Pinal Counties testified that Arizona is often the first stop in the drug’s journey through the country.
“Arizona is the funnel,” Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb said. “Nearly half of all drugs that come into America come through Arizona.
Lamb said users often don’t know that what they’re taking has fentanyl in it, but the dealers “know this is poison.”
Dunn’s story was one of six heard by the Arizona House health and human services committee, which voted to support a bill commonly referred to as The Ashley Dunn Act. No guests spoke in opposition.
“How can you be against saving lives,” Josephine Dunn asked.
HB 2469 would establish “drug trafficking homicide” as a new crime punishable on par with first degree murder. One would be found guilty of the level 1 felony if they are found to sell a narcotic drug that is a “contributing cause” of another person’s death. The bill specifies that the state doesn’t have to prove that the drug was the “sole and immediate” cause of death.
If found guilty, first-time offenders could face anywhere from 10 to 25 years in prison, and continued offenders can face up to 29 years.
The bill’s sponsor and committee Chair Steve Montenegro, a Republican from Goodyear, called fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.”
“Something needs to be done about this plague,” he said. “We can’t continue to ignore this any further.”
Committee members agreed the issue is one worth tackling, but some took issue with the bill’s far-reaching potential effects.
Most were concerned with how it might affect those who suffer from addiction rather than the dealers that the bill targets.
State Representative Matt Gress, a Republican from Phoenix, said he doesn’t want victims of the fentanyl crisis to suffer under the potential law.
“How should this committee balance the hardened criminals that the cartel is using versus folks who are under the grip of fentanyl and are dealing to support a habit?” he asked Lamb. “Should we make a distinction between the two?”
“There is a balance in law enforcement,” Lamb replied. “We don’t want to put the wrong people behind bars. We understand that certain people are trying to feed into that addiction and sharing pills with one another. I don’t believe that’s what this bill [is] designed to do.
“When you’re actively out trying to sell fentanyl pills or a Xanax pill that you know has fentanyl in it, you are one of those dealers, and you are one of those people that are causing the poisoning of American lives," he said.
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