Officials seized a massive load of illicit drugs, including 15 pounds of fentanyl, from a car parked on Myrtle Street in front of McClymonds High School in Oakland on Tuesday, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday night.
“Between San Francisco and the East Bay we have a major problem with fentanyl,” said Lt. Ray Kelly, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. “We’ve become a region that a tremendous amount of fentanyl is being pumped into, and we have a tremendous amount of people addicted to it. Every morning I see the coroner’s report and someone has died of an overdose. It’s disturbing. We’re trying to mitigate the problem.”
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office posted a message about the drug bust on Twitter and said detectives also confiscated one kilo of heroin and $139,000 in cash from the alleged drug dealers’ car.
The sheriff’s office said four suspects are in custody, adding that the suspects aren’t students and the incident isn’t connected with the school. The suspects could face additional felony charges for drug trafficking because they were within 1,000 feet of a school, officials said.
“We believe the school was used because it allowed the dealers to have more cover to blend in,” Kelly said.
The sheriff’s office originally incorrectly said on Twitter that the car was parked in the high school’s parking lot when it was actually parked in front of the school on Myrtle Street.
“We have a locked electronic gate, so there’s no way the individuals who were trafficking this substance would have gotten on campus,” Oakland Unified School District said in a statement.
This week’s drug bust comes after the sheriff’s office and the Alameda County Narcotics Task Force seized 92.5 pounds of illicit fentanyl from locations in Oakland and Hayward after a monthslong investigation — the largest drug bust in the county ever.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Dealers cut it with other drugs due to its potency, making drugs cheaper and more addictive. It’s a major contributor to the U.S. drug epidemic and fatal and nonfatal overdoses.
Drug overdoses hit an all time high in 2021, with nearly 108,000 deaths reported, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s provisional data released on Wednesday showed. Overdose deaths have been on the rise in the U.S. since the 1990s and skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overdose deaths are often the result of several drugs, and fentanyl is often mixed into drugs without the buyer knowing.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on May 13 at 9:20 a.m. to correct information about the location of the car.