Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who has been strikingly absent from the national fentanyl conversation, has “financial connections to individuals involved with criminal networks in Southern California, many of whom are tied to money laundering and the drug trade,” according to Peter Schweizer’s new book Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.
In Blood Money, Schweizer highlights Schiff’s astonishingly empty record regarding the fentanyl crisis before suggesting that the congressman could potentially risk “undue attention to his own financial” ties if he were to address the issue meaningfully.
Schiff, who is running for U.S. Senate, represents California’s 30th Congressional District, which includes Burbank, Hollywood, Glendale, and Pasadena. Schweizer notes that the fentanyl crisis is rampant in upscale Burbank where at least seven high school students had overdosed on the deadly synthetic opioid in 2022 alone. Now, schools in the Burbank Unified School District are required to carry naloxone in the event of overdoses. The effects in the city have been far-reaching.
“In 2022, two men were arrested in Burbank with a hundred thousand counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl,” Schweizer notes. “Nineteen-year-old TikTok influencer Cooper Noriega was found dead in a Burbank park with fentanyl in his system.”
Moreover, the Los Angeles area saw fentanyl deaths skyrocket “by a stunning 1,208 percent from 2016 to 2022,” Schweizer reports.
People are photographed outside the parent center at Helen Bernstein School on Wilton Place in Los Angeles, California, where a 15-year-old girl was found dead in the girls bathroom, and another 15 year old girl and a teenage boy were taken to a hospital. All were victims of fentanyl overdoses. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Demonstrators protesting to the sale of illegal drugs on Snapchat participate in a rally outside the company’s headquarters to call for tighter restrictions on the popular social media app following fatal overdoses of fentanyl in Santa Monica, California, on June 13, 2022. (RINGO CHIU/AFP via Getty Images)
However, during Schiff’s tenure as House Intelligence chair during the 116th and 117th Congresses, the committee “did nothing” to address the issue of fentanyl, according to Blood Money.
“If you go to the Intelligence Committee’s webpage that describes its work under his tenure, the word ‘fentanyl’ yields no results,” Schweizer reveals. “That is to say, the Intelligence Committee under his leadership, by its own account, did nothing on a topic that the Obama administration had declared a threat to our national security in 2017. A search of Schiff’s congressional webpage yields a lone mention of ‘fentanyl,’ a brief reference to a single piece of legislation.”
“Voters in his district have noticed the silence,” Blood Money states. Conversely, the bestselling author, who has repeatedly exposed corruption at the uppermost echelons of society, emphasizes that “Schiff was outspoken on the far, far less dangerous outbreak of monkeypox, demanding more action on a vaccine, even though it has killed no one in the United States at the time of this writing.”
The latest data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that a reported 73,686 overdose deaths from synthetic opioids alone occurred in the United States between September 2022 to September 2023. The figure excludes deaths from methadone.
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