Prince William County lawmaker takes action against fentanyl crisis amid rising youth deaths

Delegate Ian Lovejoy (R-22, Prince William County) was one of the few Virginia lawmakers who passed any new legislation on fentanyl. This deadly drug kills four to five Virginians a day.

The bill, awaiting Governor Glenn Youngkin’s signature, standardizes how children. “We’re seeing fentanyl dig deeper and earlier and younger into the school system.

More than 1,500 children and teenagers under the age of 20 died from fentanyl in 2021, four times as many as in 2018, reported Science News in April 2023.

Despite that fact, Democrats in Richmond aren’t doing much to combat the deaths, said Lovejoy.

“Democrats are afraid to add new crimes to the books because they don’t want to piss off their base,” said Lovejoy. “No laws got stricter about any crimes. No new crimes were created. We only weakened offenses in the code.”

On Tuesday, Abigail Spanberger (D-Va., 7th. Prince William, Stafford, Fredericksburg) joined Prince William County Police Chief Peter Newsham in Woodbridge to warn about the dangers of smoking fentanyl through a straw, which is an increasing number of people who consume the drug way of using the drug, reports Insidenova.com.

Spanberger used the press conference to which Potomac Local was not invited to talk about her new bill, Dubbed the Targeting Online Sales of Fentanyl Act. The bill would require the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate the methods used to enable the online sale of fentanyl and assess efforts by federal law enforcement and online providers to combat the practice.

Lovejoy said Spanberger toured the halls of the Virginia Capital multiple times during the 2024 General Assembly session, which ended March 9, and notes she failed to lobby any Democrats in the House to pass new legislation combating fentanyl.

In addition to curbing fentanyl use, Democrats failed to strengthen the penalties for drug dealers whose fentanyl kills its users. A Senate bill that would have upped the charge to felony homicide died in the Senate Courts of Justice Committee, with local Democrats Scott Surrovell (Fairfax) and Jennifer Carroll Foy (Prince William County) voting to kill it.

“I think that’s when she should have sat down with her democratic colleagues and said, ‘We need to move the ball forward on meaningful fentanyl legislation.’ She could have been very public about it, signaling that she wants and supports more aggressive fentanyl legislation, and she was mute on all those issues,” said Lovejoy.

Lovejoy, a freshman in the House of Delegates and the only Republican Delegate in Northern Virginia agreed to a wide-ranging interview about his first General Assembly session. We’ll bring more of that to you in the coming days.