TULSA, Okla. — Gavin Pritchard took his last breath after overdosing on fentanyl. He got mixed up in the wrong crowd, with people who dealt him the deadly drug. Both his mother and Sen. Weaver said some people do not realize the true severity of the drug.
"I had no idea, I didn’t know anything about fentanyl," Delana Pritchard said, "I knew about other drugs, like weed, and oxy, and stuff like that, but I didn’t know they were lacing and tainting everything."
Fentanyl can be used for real reasons. It is prescribed to people recovering from surgery and cancer patients. When mixed with other drugs on the street, its danger rises.
"I think the stakes are high, and with high stakes come high penalties," Weaver said.
He is hoping to clamp down on the people mixing fentanyl on the streets. The drug is popular because of its high potency, and cheap cost. His legislation could put manufacturers in prison for seven years, or in the largest cases, jail for life.
"Some of these parents are waking up the next morning, and their kids are dead in the bedroom. Because they’ve had a drug delivered to them," Pritchard said.
Weaver’s bill passed unanimously through committee.
"Even people who sometimes don’t like drug laws, or maybe they don’t like one thing or another about a law, everybody voted for this," Weaver said.
Perhaps they had people like Pritchard in mind.
"The pain, the cry, of a mom who lost her child is a wail, it’s not a normal cry," Pritchard said.
In Oklahoma, nearly four out of five overdose deaths in 2022 involved fentanyl. Weaver, who used to head the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said Oklahoma’s situation is not unique but it is just as bad as the rest of the country.
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