Alaska Legislature: Lunch & Learn: Alaska Fentanyl Response Project, 4/15/26, 12pm

Okay, well, good— almost afternoon. I'm Bill Wilkowski, State Senator for East Anchorage. I want to welcome you all. We have a very special guest today for Lunch and Learn, Sandy Snodgrass. Many of you know her and the amazing work that she's done for our state and for our country.

Sandy is a clinical psychologist and founded the Alaska Fentanyl Response Project after tragically losing her son Bruce to fentanyl. Through this project, she travels to Alaska schools teaching kids about the dangers of fentanyl to protect them from having the same fate. She has also traveled to Washington, D.C. to share the message— share her message and encourage lawmakers to pass laws supporting the fight against the fentanyl crisis. In December of last year, Sandy stood in the Oval Office as the President of the United States signed Bruce's Law into law. Bruce's Law will provide new tools to help organizations across multiple fields address this growing crisis.

She'll talk about the bill. She's done amazing work, and I also am proud to have her as a constituent. Sandy, could you come up here for a second? Because we wanted to recognize your incredible work to the state and to the country, and we have a legislative citation honoring you. Wow.

Thank you. That is a surprise. Here you go. Get a picture of that. Great.

All right. So without anything further, thank you again for your really incredible work. I'm going to turn it over to you and let you do your presentation. This is a great presentation. If you haven't seen it.

She has done this for thousands of students all across the state, and we're just thrilled to have you here and broadcasting to the legislature, but also all across the state through our, our gavel, Alaska AKLegTV. So thank you again. Thank you, Senator. Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you very much.

Um, so my name is Sandy Snodgrass. I'm the director of AK Fentanyl Response, and I appreciate everyone being here and everyone watching. Uh, the first thing that I would like to do is Just to give a little background for people that may be unfamiliar with fentanyl and the illicit drug supply, particularly in the state of Alaska right now, we've created, with law enforcement support, a 13-minute documentary called "Poisoning in Alaska." So we'll show that first. Thank you.

Officers responded here for reports of an overdose with a male not breathing. We got here a couple minutes after the call came out. When officers went in, the male was on the sofa, agonal breathing, no pulse. We were able to get him off the couch, move some furniture out of the way, and the other officer with me, Officer Sharps, started CPR. AFD medics showed up shortly after that and started doing CPR themselves.

They did give the male Narcan. He was transported to the hospital. He was waking up when they left with him, so it looks good in that regard. But looks like it was related to opioid use. So the Narcan usually brings them out of it pretty well, um, and that's a dead giveaway that it was opioid related, um, because it will only work for that.

Like, um, but usually it's a good sign when they sit up and stuff like that. Obviously They want to get them to the hospital because they could re-overdose when that wears off. It's not permanent. But if they get them out of here in the ambulance, they're usually going to make it. We see this every day, unfortunately.

There's multiple on our shift every single day. We carry Narcan. We give it out a lot. The fire department's pretty quick at getting to stuff, and they can give them a lot more than we can with our nasal spray. But it's something we go to every day.

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How bad is it really? Is it really that bad? It's one of those things where if you're not into that culture, if you're not into the drug culture, if you're not exposed to it much, you just really don't realize how bad drugs can be, how bad the drug culture can be, just because it's not at your doorstep. But once you have a family member, a friend, a colleague that is impacted by it, then it becomes a little more real for people, and I think they start to get a better understanding of how dangerous it is. How bad it, it can be.

In 2023 statewide, we had almost 2,000 overdoses recorded in the state of Alaska. Those are the ones that are actually reported. Uh, out of that, uh, about 1,200 of them in Anchorage alone, just our city here in Anchorage. Out of those, uh, 2,000 statewide, about 340 of those were fatal. And within Anchorage, about 220 of them were fatal.

Those are not just the person out on the street living homeless, chronically addicted to drugs. Those are kids, those are mothers, those are fathers, those are brothers, those are sisters. These are people that are dying. The drug is indiscriminate in who it kills.

My sister passed away from a fentanyl overdose.

I got home from gymnastics practice when I was in like middle school and my parents were, I kinda could tell that they weren't really in a happy mood and that something kinda happened and they kinda just told me when I got home and I thought they were joking or lying or I didn't really know what to believe. [Speaker] The stuff that's out there right now, is killing people, and it's generally, especially when we're talking about fentanyl, this is a lot of the times, this is a one-shot deal. It's, you, you have no idea what you're ingesting. The people that make these illicit controlled substances, they're not chemists, all right? This is not done in a lab.

This is not a prescription from a doctor. You have no idea what you're getting your hands on, and what worked last week and you try the exact same thing next week is the difference between getting a bad batch or getting a super hot batch of dope, and all of a sudden, we're getting called as patrol officers to respond to the overdose. And in a situation like that, especially with an opioid like fentanyl, seconds count. And when seconds count, help is generally minutes away. With drugs, it seems like as soon as law enforcement officers or the public in general learns the signs, symptoms, or, you know, what something looks like, It's gonna change on you, right?

So traditionally fentanyl was like the blue, small blue pills that had the M30 stamped on them. Now it can come in a lot of different forms. It'll be mixed in a lot of things. So sometimes people, for example, think that they're smoking meth, but actually it's a combination of fentanyl and meth and other substances. I deal with fake pills all the time.

That's a large portion of my seizures are fake Xanax bars. You know, you can get Xanny bars on the internet and they come back. I mean, I just made a seizure a couple months ago, probably 5,000 pills. Not a single one of them were Xanax, even though every single one said Xanax stamped on the side of them. You can buy them from China and China will ship you over fentanyl in whatever substance or form you want, or M30s, which is a Percocet.

That Percocet comes in an M30 pill. That's why they're stamped from the factory. But you can buy a pill press and make it whatever color you want and have it say whatever you want. You have the M30 stamp on every single one of them. There's guys out here in Anchorage that are making M30s that look like an M30.

They're same color, same M, same 30. I mean, they're— you can't tell the difference.

She had bought some Xanax off the street and it was laced with fentanyl.

And when they found her body, she had half a pill next to her body.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, all right? This was created in a lab for pain management. This is people that are having surgeries. These are people that are combat soldiers in war zones as a pain management tool. People that are suffering from a terminal disease like cancer, they get issued fentanyl to help relieve that.

So the symptoms of a poisoning by fentanyl are similar to a poisoning by any opioid. A narcotic analgesic, it slows everything down. It blocks those warm, squishy centers of your brain that, that deals with pain. And the more you get, the more that affects you. So everything starts to literally shut down.

Your brain is literally shutting down your respiratory system, your circulatory system, to the point that if you have enough of these receptors in your brain blocked, you're going to stop breathing, your heart's going to stop beating, you're going to suffocate, and you're going to die. So the symptoms that you're looking at is what you would expect if somebody's suffocating. You're going to see them become lethargic, they're going to go on the nod, which literally is like they're falling asleep while they're sitting there talking to you, and ultimately they're going to collapse and become unresponsive. Their circulatory system is going to shut down. They're going to start turning blue.

Their fingernails are going to start turning blue. Their lips are going to start turning blue. Their pupils are going to constrict just simply because of the fact that's what opioids do to your body. We could be in the middle of the night, and that's, that's a clue when we do DUIs on the street if somebody's under the influence of an opioid, because it could be pitch black. And this is Alaska.

It's dark 6 months out of the year here. And you would expect when it's dark, your pupils get larger, but if it's in the middle of the night, they're pupils look like pinholes, pretty good clue that, that you're dealing with some kind of opioid. And, uh, yeah, no intervention on that. If we don't— that's literally when you get to that point, it's intervention needs to be seconds away because the result of that, if that doesn't get reversed or corrected, is it could lead to death. He left the house on the mountain bike On a Thursday afternoon, October 25th, 2021, I said, you know, like I always did, Bruce, I love you, be careful out there.

And that's the last thing I ever said to him.

His body was recovered 2 days later by a dog walker behind a Wells Fargo drive-through. And a McDonald's drive-through, about 30 yards from the drive-through.

He was not able to call out for help. I found out later that it was 100% fentanyl that he received that day. Somehow dropped dead where he stood and couldn't call out for help.

Oh yeah, scares me. Scares me for, uh, you know, I tell my daughters all the time, I tell youth all the time, don't take anything basically that your doctor did not prescribe you. Um, I mean, we could talk about that as well, but don't take anything that your doctor didn't prescribe you, that, you know, didn't come straight from the pharmacy. Uh, you know, my children know, like, they don't take aspirin from somebody else. If they need a Tylenol, aspirin, they get it from me or from the house.

It's, uh, of course you just can't trust what someone may hand you in the, um, out in the street. And not even if they're meaning to cause you harm. I mean, who knows where they could have gotten it from and just, hey, take this, like, it worked for me. So you just can't trust it. Don't take it.

It's scary. It is. Like that 18-year-old I was telling you about, her dad was doing CPR on her before I got there. And so I took over CPR and we continued doing CPR even though we knew that she was dead from a poisoning until the medics got there so that they could do their due diligence. But, you know, on those scenes, the sergeant doesn't need to make the notification because they know.

And that's what teens— that's the scary part is it's not going to be a notification. It's going to be, you know, the parents coming home to find their kid deceased on the couch or in their bedroom or in the bathroom. We found out from a very nice policeman who said, this is my third call today on a fentanyl death, and it was 1 in the afternoon. And he said, this is—. I, I— he was, you know, my age, so it wasn't his first rodeo as a policeman.

And he said, I don't know what's going on, but this is Unbelievably not okay. You know what, if it's not in a pill, in a pill bottle with a doctor's name on it that you got from a pharmacy, you should probably suspect that it's laced with fentanyl. That is not a joke. Once you start with it, like, it's hard to get off and it's very easy to get back into it even after some success in being clean and sober and stuff like that. So the best way to avoid it is to never start.

This, as it sits, is not going to help in any way. It's not going to— it's not a solution. I wish that I had not gone so far down the track I had and I had maybe kept the courage to try to fix your world, make it what you want. It's—. We have the power to let it be whatever we want it to be.

Uh, just stand up and, and don't be afraid. Treatment and stopping people from ever starting, beating the addiction before it starts, is the only cure that we're going to have to this. And this is not something that the Anchorage Police Department or the Alaska State Troopers can arrest our way out of. At the end of the day, um, we need help from mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. We have to start it from ever starting.

It's the only way we're going to beat What do you want to say to us? One small mistake can completely ruin a life and just take it away. And people should really just think about their actions before they do something.

Thank you. This documentary is meant for young people. Young people in Alaska. So I show it at schools every chance I get. I believe what law enforcement believes.

I kind of talk about it as a three-legged stool. One stool is demand reduction, the other stool is law enforcement, and the third school— leg of the stool is treatment. And if we don't do all three, the stool will fall over. So I am not law enforcement, I don't have a treatment center, but I, I did have a child that died from fentanyl poisoning. And so I can tell my story to anybody, anywhere, anytime.

And hopefully the message for me is you can never die from an illicit drug if you never try an illicit drug. Demand reduction. So a lot of people call that prevention, and I do too. That's really more what it's known as, is I work in the prevention world, but I call it demand reduction. If we can help our young people understand that this is not the— this is not the world that I grew up in, that you grew up in, even my my 30-something nieces grew up in.

This is a different world we live in with fentanyl now. And, um, you know, that's hard to convince— not convince, educate even parents, because the parents will say, well, you know, I was in high school, I was in college, I did a little of this, I did a little of that, and, you know, moved on with my life. That's not the world we live in anymore. We live in a world that one pill, one half of a pill, Haley, one half of one pill can kill you. And it's not a tolerance that's built, you know, it's nothing like— it's one time and you can die.

And so that is a very difficult message to get through to people and young people. Bruce You know, Bruce was an Alaskan boy through and through. All the Alaskan things. He was a free solo mountain climber. He was a certified mountain guide.

He was an extreme sport, a high adrenaline young man, just like so many of our Alaskan boys and girls. He lived on the edge and loved it. And you know to convince him not to do something that might make him feel good, like a pill or an alcohol or a drug, was very, very difficult, even though he was doing all those other things. The call I thought I would maybe get someday was a call from a park ranger, from Fish and Game, from state troopers that they had found him on the bottom, bottom of a rock cliff somewhere with an injury or even a death from free solo mountain climbing. That's, that's not the call I got.

He was safe out there. He was not safe less than a mile away from our home in Anchorage. He got 100% fentanyl on a mountain bike ride in town. He was— those of you that are familiar with Anchorage, he was beside the Carr's grocery store behind the McDonald's and the Wells Fargo drive-through on Boniface and DeBar. We lived less than a mile away.

And I don't— you know, I don't know what happened that day. I'll never know. There was very few investigations of what they termed accidental overdoses at that time. That has changed thankfully since my son died October 26th, 2021. That has changed and law enforcement is investigating these deaths now as drug-induced homicides.

And I'm very grateful for that. They have an overwhelming number of cases to deal with. Law enforcement all over the country is re— I— most of the time that's who I'm with during these presentations is a DEA agent, the U.S. Attorney, and they're working 24 hours a day to try to save lives in this country. And here in the state, the state troopers are wonderful. APD has really changed the way they treat these deaths, and I'm grateful for that.

You know, the investigation is too late for Bruce. I'm never going to know what happened to my child, but part of what drives me is being with other parents, walking them a little bit as best I can through this process. Process, and we— we, I say we, I feel like I'm, you know, part of their family that I know their lost loved ones, and we get investigations going. The DEA will take the case, the state troopers take the case, and they are getting amazing results and convictions, long-term convictions for these drug-induced homicides. The state of Alaska just passed the law last year that we now have second-degree murder for drug-induced homicides in this state.

And I know that's, even for me, it, my son was killed by an illicit drug, but when I asked the police, you know, what happened, what do you think happened? They responded to me that probably the person that gave my son the drugs is probably also dead because he was a drug user as well. So even if he's not dead, he likely knows that he killed my son. There was evidence of other people on the scene, so he's living with that. I, I, you know, I'm not sure it does any good to put him in prison for 20 years.

It may help him be able to live with what he did. Quite frankly, I don't know. But nobody— it's, you know, that guy, whoever gave my son the drugs, is almost as much a victim as my son is. He likely didn't know there was fentanyl. He likely didn't want to kill my son.

He did not do it intentionally. But that's what happened. So it's— I don't call it accidental overdose. I call it poisoning.

And to that end, Bruce's Law came about. We all know that in Alaska, politics is retail. You know, I can come to Juneau and I can knock on senators' doors and talk to them, and most of the country's not like that, and we're very lucky. I'm very lucky that I can contact one of my US senators, and her response is, well, let's do a law, a federal law. You know, that's— it's amazing that we're able to have that kind of access to our legislatures, both here in Juneau and in DC.

And Senator Murkowski and her staff wrote Bruce's Law. We had meetings every Wednesday Wednesday for about 6 months, meetings every Wednesday, and introduced Bruce's Law onto the Senate floor. It was still during COVID so it was really weird because we were up there in the gallery by ourselves when she read it on the floor.

And then I start, you know, I went to Juneau probably 4 times, or I'm sorry, D.C. probably 4 times a year the senator's office would say, go see this senator, go see this representative, we need them to co-sponsor, we need them to understand more about the bill. So I would, you know, advocate for Bruce's Law in D.C. for a couple of years until it, you know, it passed. Senator, or Congressman Begich was not in the legislature legislature then, but he was so delighted that Bruce's Law passed. I— and he gave me the numbers on it, how many bills. I didn't know that.

I just thought you introduce a bill and it becomes a law. No one told me that normally they don't, so I just kept working, you know. I just kept going down there saying, well, when's it going to be a law? Not knowing that it was unusual. So I um, the year Bruce's Law passed, 35 laws passed in the entire Congress that year, and Bruce's Law was one of them.

So that's pretty amazing, and I recognize that now.

So we're talking about poisoning. Bruce's Law is going to do the awareness part that I do. I go to schools as often And yesterday I was at Baggett Middle School all day. We did 8th grade health classes all day yesterday. The DEA supervisor showed up, the U.S. Attorney showed up.

That's how much they believe in demand reduction. Just like the officers on the video, they cannot arrest, they cannot prosecute, they cannot treat their way out of this. The way out of this is demand reduction. You can never die from an illicit drug if you never try an illicit drug. That's the way out.

And they know it. And they show up to these schools with me over and over and over and over again. Bruce's Law will do that nationwide. So that, that's where I live is demand reduction. The other place where I live is fentanyl is poison.

So I was in the Oval Office. Signing Bruce's Law, and there's a man that lost his son, and he's a chemist, and he believes and is correct that fentanyl is a chemical weapon and could easily be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. So that's scary. We always tell him, Jim, you're scaring us. Please stop, but he wouldn't.

He just kept going and going and going. So I was in the Oval Office and Jim's voice came in my head and said, Sandy, do it. So I said to the President, Mr. President, the next thing in the fight against fentanyl is to declare it a weapon of mass destruction. He was signing the photo of Bruce that's out in the hall and he looked up at me and he I said, that's a good idea. Why haven't we done that?

And he pointed to his chief of staff and said, done. 2 Weeks later, he signed an executive order and announced from the Oval Office that he was declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. So that, that's where we are with this drug. It's unimaginable to me that it's true, but it is. And the response from the people that create the precursor chemicals and develop the drug fentanyl— maybe we would have hoped, I certainly hoped and thought that the President declaring it a weapon of mass destruction would back them down a little bit.

It did not. They, they only made it worse. So we have a drug now, particularly in Anchorage, killing people almost every day called carfentanil. So if you think about fentanyl as a poison, it's about 10 grains of salt. They showed, I think, the pencil tip, and I love the pencil tip with 2 milligrams is the lethal dose.

Another way to visualize that is 10 grains of regular table salt is the lethal dose of fentanyl.

The reaction from the people that are, in my opinion, intentionally killing Americans is to create carfentanil. It takes 2 to 3 grains. Of table salt to kill you with carfentanil. I have 5 families in Anchorage that have lost loved ones to carfentanil since October of this last year. So it's here.

Carfentanil's here. There's a little girl, 16-year-old girl, you may be familiar with that case, Alina, in the Valley. Car fentanyl. Mobley is the perpetrator. U.S. Attorney took that case, and he, he pled guilty, and he pled guilty to 30 years in federal prison for car fentanyl.

So unfortunately, you know, I thought we were headed in the right direction, and I think many, many people are working very, very hard to be headed in the right direction, but the introduction of carfentanil and xylosines is only making it scarier out there.

Maybe I, I had hoped and thought maybe I was going to not stop working, but at least slow down a little bit. But I— how is that possible when 5 families have lost loved ones in Anchorage in the last just short number of months to an even more dangerous drug. And that's what's happened. So I come here to ask you if you, you know, anybody, anytime, anywhere that someone wants to learn about fentanyl, have an AK Fentanyl presentation, I will go. And there's legis— any legislation that is helpful to address this.

Again, we need all three. We need demand reduction, law enforcement, and treatment. All three.

That's still my life, you know, after these number of years since my son died. Grief does whatever it does to people, and I've, you know, never asked parents to do what I'm doing unless they're comfortable with it. But there's a number of us, large numbers of us around the country that do this every day, every day, every day. You know, our kids are dead, so I don't really— why are we doing it? We really don't know why we're doing it because our children are gone.

But your children are not, and we don't want them to be. We don't want anyone to to ever live through your child disappearing one day and then the police knocking on your door. It's, it's, it just shouldn't be happening. It shouldn't be happening. And it's happening way, way too frequently.

The numbers right now, the DEA has a new slide. The numbers from the DEA right now are saying approximately 281 Americans lose their life to fentanyl poisoning every day in this country. The numbers for high school 14 to 18-year-olds is 22 a week in this country. 22 High school students a week lose their life to fentanyl poisoning.

My analogy for that, um, number is, is as if a jet airliner a jumbo jet airliner was crashing in this country every single day, day after day after day after day. If that were true, it was a jet airliner crashing every day, the world would stop in its tracks and do something. But because it's a drug, somehow this country still thinks my 22-year-old son should not have, and somehow we allow that stigma in our minds to continue, and my son and 180 other children and young people should not have. They deserve We've got to change that. We've got to change that every day, day after day after day after day.

If it was yogurt, no one would ever eat yogurt again. But, you know, because it's an illicit drug, somehow we are allowing this. I'm not allowing it, but we as a nation continue to allow it to happen every single day.

So I'm here to ask for help, you know, ask for help. I need help. I can't do this alone. I need legislators to help. I need schools to help.

I need law enforcement to help. I need parents to help. AK Fentanyl Response is me, and I, you know, in any way, if anyone wants to be helpful, I, you know, save a life, save a life. So we've got about 5 or 7 minutes left. I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody has any, or I can keep talking.

So anybody have any questions?

Do you want to ask anything?

Have I missed something that you wanted me to cover? Just how about you tell us all the schools you've been to? No, recently. Okay. You did a lot yesterday.

Tell us a little bit about that. So my favorite thing, so I really scared everybody. I can see it on your face. So I'm sorry if I scared you. But so I do that policy, I call it 30,000-foot stuff.

Go to DC, come to Juneau, do that policy law kind of thing, scare people. And then I go home to Anchorage or Alaska, anywhere in Alaska. I have rural villages I absolutely love. I go and get boots on the ground and get eye to eye with kids. And I got to do that yesterday, 30 at a time, 8th grade kids, 30 at a time, 8th grade kids.

And I can see them. I'm a psychologist by training, by trade, so I can see them turn either by me talking about Bruce or the DEA talking about how dangerous the drugs are, but you can see their face and they, they're like, uh, uh, what? And they are— we get them. I—. We can get them.

And I think that's making a difference. I really do. I think those kids don't know still, and particularly our Alaskan rural children, they really, they, you know, for me, when this reached my son in Anchorage, I was shocked. And the fact that it's now reaching our rural communities to the extent that it is, is shocking. I'm not shocked by it anymore because because I know, but other people are still very, very shocked.

And I know why that is, and it's the same reason— well, yeah, there are a lot of reasons, but the reason the cartels are targeting Alaskan rural communities is the same reason an egg costs so much there. Same thing with the pills. I can buy an egg in Anchorage for a, you know, a dollar. I buy an egg in Chevak for $10. Same thing with an illicit drug.

And they know it. And they're purposely targeting Alaskan rural communities. When I'm with the DEA, they put up a graphic of the amount of drugs that are being seized before they get to rural communities. And there for quite some time, the one in Togiak, just, I could not get over the statistics in Togiak of the number of seizures that the DEA was making. 3,000 Pills at a time in a backpack on a plane to Togiak.

Togiak has 800 people in it. It just, was terrifying to me. Still is. And they're pretty good at spotting it now. And we've had independent airlines— I won't call them out— but really great pilots that now report.

They report. They call the troopers and say, this guy's not right. And they come out. This guy's not right. He's got thousands of pills.

In his backpack because there's no security going on those little planes. But those— a lot of those pilots are our best, our best first line of defense to keep it out of the rural communities. But it's, you know, it gets through. Obviously they can't get everything.

And, you know, one death— I'm going to say Dillingham because I know a young lady out of Dillingham, 18-year-old. That little girl was poisoned by fentanyl a couple of years ago.

It— Dillingham will never be the same. Not just her family, not— I'll never be the same because I went to Dillingham and it's— it just— it devastates the community to lose even one person.

And so the numbers coming out of those rural communities are terrifying. They're horrible. And it just keeps happening. We've— Nome has had recently had numbers of cases of fentanyl poisoning. And I've been to Nome and it's a, you know, it's a small community and they take care of each other, and they don't know how to take care of each other from this.

They don't know what— how to prevent it.

That's my— that's, you know, again, my wheelhouse is demand reduction through awareness, to go to those communities and say, don't take it, don't take it. They don't— you know, they're innocuous little pills unless someone tells you That pill is going to kill you, could kill you, potentially kill you. It's a little blue pill and it looks harmless, and you may take it to feel— to change the way you feel. That's all they're doing. And so I, um, the only thing I can do as one person is keep telling that story over and over and over again.

So that's what I'm here to do today. Thank you. I think the pizza is still back there. If anybody wants to have a presentation or anybody wants to help in any way, I have a website, so please do that. Contact me through the website, akfentnerresponse.com.

Thank you very much for having me. Something I really have to do.