On Thursday, San Francisco officials confirmed that an infant was exposed to fentanyl, narrowly escaping death due to an overdose on Wednesday.
The parents of 10-month-old Senna say their son was playing in Moscone Park on Tuesday afternoon when their nanny, Wendy Marroqui, observed that the child looked like he was feeling dizzy and his lips started to turn blue.
Marroqui applied CPR and called the paramedics, who treated the child.
A redacted version of the child’s toxicology report shows that the child was given Narcan after a fentanyl overdose and respiratory arrest. Narcan, is a medicine that attaches to opioid receptors and reverses and blocks the effects of other opioids, such as fentanyl.
The baby’s father, Ivan Matkovic, posted on Nextdoor that his son “barely survived.”
UPDATE: City Hall leaders said they were outraged by the reported fentanyl overdose of a baby at a Marina playground this week and vowed to step up San Francisco’s response to its escalating drug crisis.https://t.co/Kc2rtc6n6s
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) December 1, 2022
According to the Medical Examiner’s Office, 474 people died of fentanyl-related drug overdoses in San Francisco in 2021.
The Drug Enforcement Administration says that as little as two milligrams of fentanyl can kill a human adult, depending on the body size. Most of it is produced in China, and either comes over directly or is brought across the border from Mexico and Canada. Around 2.2 lbs of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people.
Responding to the overdose story, Dr. Hillary Kunins, the city’s behavioral health director, tweeted: “While this is obviously concerning and upsetting for the family and for all of us, this is not a drug that is easily found or regularly encountered by the public.
Drug overdoses killed 711 in 2020 and 645 in 2021. This number does not include non-fatal overdoses.
In June, voters recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D.), who did not oversee a single fentanyl conviction during his time in office. Even former prosecutors from his office had publicly joined the recall push against the radical DA.
Some Twitter users have taken to posting grim pictures of the drug-infested San Francisco streets to bring awareness to the seriousness of the situation.
San Francisco right now pic.twitter.com/FmGdX6B9gK
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) September 9, 2022
Dr. Hillary Kunins has earlier attributed the increase in fatalities to “misunderstandings about the disease of addiction, and what might lead a person to develop such a condition.”
