Quick Take:
The toll of misery and death is increasing, as Santa Cruz County now counts a 25-fold increase in fentanyl deaths over five years. A visit to Coral Street, just more than a mile from downtown Santa Cruz, reveals a street scene beyond imagination – but in plain sight. Many days, a dozen or two or more people hang out near the intersection with River Street. They do and sell drugs and recount their painful stories. In the first of a three-part series, Lookout reports on the mounting toll of fentanyl here and responses to it.
Last year, the synthetic opioid fentanyl claimed the lives of 133 people in Santa Cruz County. Fentanyl-related deaths doubled from the 66 recorded in 2022 and exceeded those who died in the county from traffic crashes, suicides and homicides combined, a grim statistic Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart revealed in a Facebook post in May.
It’s also a 25-fold increase in opioid deaths over the last five years.
This year’s death toll trend is unknown. Despite requests to the county coroner’s office for the most current numbers, the data has not been forthcoming. In our earlier reporting on the mounting fentanyl crisis, Lookout pointed to the county’s slow record-keeping as a pinch point as the community seeks to meet the challenge.
The county has so many dead in the morgue the sheriff has added another “death investigator” to handle the workload, he told Lookout. The sheriff also doubled the size of his fentanyl crisis response team to five detectives, a sergeant, a lieutenant and a drug detection dog this spring.
“We’re finding fentanyl in methamphetamine. We’re finding it in cocaine. It’s in a lot of counterfeit street pills.”
Where Coral Street meets River Street, north of downtown Santa Cruz, one block north of where River meets Highway 1, I found the current epicenter of Santa Cruz’s fentanyl epidemic —what Sheriff Hart calls the “hotspot” of the county.
Part 1: With fentanyl deaths doubling, Coral Street is a “hot spot”
Part 2: Fentanyl response: Redoubling efforts as the crisis doubles
On Coral Street one Thursday afternoon in June, about 30 people loitered, a not-unusual number as Lookout has revisited the area in recent days and weeks. A few smoked fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid, discreetly. Others passed out on the sidewalks, oblivious to the world, sat on curbs, or aimlessly lingered for no apparent reason.
Drug activity has been common on Coral Street for years, said the sheriff. Not due to the long-established homeless shelter there, but because that’s where drug dealers sell their products, he said.
Occasionally, the sheriff’s office sends narcotics deputies to Coral Street to catch dealers, even announcing busts on Instagram. Still, his common refrain is, “We can’t arrest our way out of this situation.”
There are many stories on Coral Street. And a visit or two there provides just a glimpse of lives suspended.
Misery on Coral Street
Kelly Ostlund, 44, has been battling drug addiction reminders that the fentanyl crisis is not just a statistic, but a deeply personal struggle.
Ostlund pals around with Shane Veir, another unhoused man.
Veir had just woken up when I arrived. His speech was slow and hesitant, and his downcast eyes gave him the appearance of a man resigned to profound sorrow. Ostlund asked his friend if he wanted to get high. “Soon,” Veir responds.
Ostlund, a self-proclaimed "adrenaline junky," seeks another way to lift his friend's spirits.
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” he says. That’s where Ostlund wants to take his friend Veir: Las Vegas — if they can get the money together. Maybe in Vegas, he says, they can relive “a terrible experience with extremely dangerous drugs,” as Hunter S. Thompson wrote in that gonzo novel. Ostlund says they finally get unstuck from the negativity on Coral Street, away from the thieves. Besides, Sin City is fun with a drug dependency, he says.
Veir demurs. “There’s no light-hearted part.”
Veir, 30, wanted to become a professional surfer, but that dream is far from being realized on Coral. At 22, he first left California for Missouri with the love of his life, Erica. Before he left the state, says Veir, he would offer the homeless in Santa Cruz money, then yank it away for kicks.
“My parents were drug addicts. I hated drug users. Now I understand life is hard, and no one knows what they are doing.”
Veir says he attempted suicide last spring. After Erica overdosed and died, he jumped off a bridge in Missouri, he says. She ate a fentanyl-tainted Xanax bar. Before Erica's death, the couple planned to return to California, even signing a lease for an apartment in Santa Barbara.
The attempted suicidal fall broke Veir’s back. Doctors prescribed OxyCodone for the pain, he says. When the prescription ended, inclined toward addiction, he bought fentanyl from dealers to ease the pill withdrawals.
Veir returned to Santa Cruz three months ago and has lived on the streets ever since. On his second day on Coral Street, he says, someone stole Erica’s urn from his backpack.
Fentanyl keeps haunting memories of Erica out of Veir’s mind. “It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude of a loss like that.” Veir prefers fentanyl because, as he explained to me, “It’s the only way I can stop thinking about her.”
Internal despair, childhood traumas, broken families, lack of social support and economic instability drive many to drug use and dependency. An estimated one in six Americans take psychiatric medications. Alcohol is ubiquitous, as are prescription opioids.
When those mainstream drugs are not enough to stop pain or maintain a bulwark against life’s horrors, people like Veir and Ostlund seek more potent substances.
The synthetic opioid fentanyl acts on brain receptors to create feelings of pain relief, relaxation, contentment and pleasure. The substance can be addictive to the point of an all-consuming, self-destructive obsession. Medical professionals say fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine.
The Coral Neighborhood
Coral Street is within sight of the well-visited Costco. Housing Matters, which offers both a homeless shelter and temporary housing for the unhoused, and the Homeless Persons Health Project, a clinic, anchor the street's east end. On the west end of the street, activity at a concrete manufacturer sends dust into the air. Railroad tracks bisect Coral. A scenic train offers tourists a glimpse of the tormented souls chasing the next high.
John Davidson is a welder at Sea Berg Metal Fabricators on Coral Street, a few yards from the tracks. He watches people dealing and using drugs outside the shop all day, every day.
“Fentanyl is shit. I don’t understand it,” he says. “It doesn’t look like fun.”
He reports overdoses happen all the time on Coral Street. He witnessed six just this year alone.
“I watched a guy’s soul leave before the paramedic showed up. I saw a guy in a wheelchair overdose, fall out of his chair, and break his neck.”
Davidson says police clear the street every few months so sanitation can remove the tents and debris.
Another Sea Berg employee showed me a plastic bottle of needles and unused Narcan, the fast-acting medicine that treats an opioid overdose. He collects the paraphernalia from the ground in front of the shop.
“As soon as the police stop patrolling, it builds up again,” he says. (The Santa Cruz Police Department referred Lookout to the sheriff’s office for fentanyl-related questions).
A Community Response on Coral Street
Fentanyl-tainted drugs have seeped into the illicit supply everywhere, say those close to the problem, as traffickers and dealers mix the cheaper synthetic opioid with pricier substances like cocaine and reap greater profits. End users pay the heaviest price.
The Santa Cruz community’s medical professionals, government agencies and concerned residents have tried to tamp down on the effects of the fentanyl scourge, with mixed results, as we describe in part two of this series. Nevertheless, people continue to die in Santa Cruz from accidental fentanyl overdoses in both private homes and public places like Coral Street.
Established in 1987, the Homeless Persons Health Project (HPHP) offers free or low-cost healthcare. HPHP’s three grant-funded health centers in Santa Cruz County, with a dental center in Watsonville, serve more than 3,000 patients yearly.
The HPHP health clinic on Coral Street, open to all, not only people with a drug addiction or dependency, sees upwards of 70 individuals each day.
Joey Crottogini, health center manager for HPHP, which offers low-cost healthcare through three grant-funded health centers in Santa Cruz County, told Lookout his team has been preparing for xylazine for some time.
“We want patients coming to our clinics to feel welcome,” he said. “Everyone almost gets applause for coming into the clinic. People experiencing homelessness usually have negative experiences with health care systems.”
Because of bad previous experiences, it’s a delicate process to gain clients' trust, said Crottogini. “At the end of the day, it’s all about harm reduction. You can’t make a generalized assumption that everybody living outside is using substances, fentanyl.”
HPHP’s doctors and nurses offer various services for the homeless and impoverished, including primary care, therapy and psychiatry, wound care, acupuncture, benefits advocacy and medication-assisted treatment (MAT).
MAT, started in 2016, combines therapy with specific medicines, like buprenorphine, to manage symptoms of fentanyl withdrawal, which are so painful it can compel users to seek another dose.
In 2018, HPHP’s MAT program moved to lower barriers, essentially fewer bureaucratic hindrances, that could stand between the patient and medications. Crottogini said that’s when fentanyl’s spread widened in Santa Cruz.
“Fentanyl started to trickle in more and more, and not just in Santa Cruz, but across the state. People in this field share notes about what they see in their area.”
The county coroner reported only five fentanyl-related overdose deaths in 2019 before it surged 2,560% to 133 deaths in 2023.
Outside the HPHP Coral Street clinic, the homeless and dopesick wait for the health clinic to open. Nearby, a man yells, “They stole from me!” to no one in particular while a woman sits on a bench and picks at her scabby legs, complaining about “belly burns” and how her friends left her behind.
“Good friends they are,” she says.
Another woman, Spider, 44, sits on a bench outside HPHP and sorts through a pile of children’s books. She is at the clinic to support her friend Mike inside. Spider tells me she used fentanyl to get off heroin. “It’s cheaper.”
Spider came to Santa Cruz when she was 17. Her mother drove the teenager south from Washington in a school bus and dropped Spider off at the beach. Mom took off, and Spider hasn’t seen her since, she says. After nine years on the streets, Spider found a permanent place to live.
Still, she is critical of the city of Santa Cruz's plan to build a new five-story emergency shelter on Coral Street.
“They want to build a building here. The rooms are jail-sized. They want to create a mental ward,” Spider says.
What Spider calls a “mental ward,” city officials call a “navigation center.” The navigation center would be a 100-bed emergency shelter with supportive services coming to Coral Street in a few years. Funding for the shelter, which aims to eliminate homeless encampments, may come from various sources, including state and federal grants and the city’s general fund.
Former Santa Cruz mayor and Housing Matters co-founder Don Lane said the new shelter is still in the planning stage. He expects the new building to offer services like meals and case management and expand the overall shelter bed capacity in Santa Cruz.
The new shelter will occupy 125 Coral Street, the Sea Berg Metal Fabricators site.
Inside the Sea Berg warehouse, among a jumble of metal and scrap, an employee complained that people had cut the fence and stolen batteries and tools from the company’s trucks. He blamed Housing Matters for attracting thieves.
“Homeless services have taken over the whole block. They put all their bad apples in one bin.”
Tom Stagg is Housing Matters' chief initiatives officer. He’s been working on Coral Street for seven years, managing emergency shelters, day services (showers, bathroom), and employment training for the unhoused. He said drugs are not allowed on the Housing Matters campus, which can shelter 180 individuals on any given night, but that hasn’t stopped users from trying to smuggle prohibited items into the shelter.
“When I started here, and for the first few years, we were not strangers to accidental overdoses. But they were rare, a few a year, less than five. And then, when fentanyl was reported in the media nationwide, I noticed there was a lag of a year or two before we saw the impact here in 2023.”
Stagg began tracking incident reports written by Housing Matters security contractors related to overdoses last year. From September 2023 through mid-May 2024, he said Housing Matters had 13 reports of overdoses on campus and 61 overdose incidents on Coral Street.
Sheltered people have fewer overdoses than the unsheltered, said Stagg.
Next to Sea Berg lies another warehouse. The structure’s owners, sick of raids on their property, erected an electrified fence to keep thieves at bay.
Camaraderie amid the chaos
“I need to find a ride out of here, but people keep stealing my phone,” Daniel, who declines to share his surname, tells me. He’s 48 and has been living on Coral Street on and off for six years. He sells drugs when he needs money, he says. Living on the street here makes it impossible to get on a schedule and build discipline to escape.
“Fentanyl saved my life — I almost died from an infection from a heroin needle,” he says. “I have more willpower than the average person here. It saved my life, but fentanyl is not good.”
Willpower, if such a thing exists, is not enough for Daniel. Trapped on Coral, Daniel has at least found camaraderie. He claims the tent city, dismantled by the city in early June, enabled him and his cohort to build saved lives.
“Fewer people died because we looked after each other,” he says. “Cops removed our things. They treat us like cattle. It guarantees you’ll lose everything you have when they come around.”
After authorities cleared the Coral Street encampment on June 3, Daniel received a new blanket from a sympathetic benefactor. That, too, like his phone, was stolen.
“You should have seen when the police and city came with their dump trucks to pick up the debris,” an employee of a shop on Coral Street says. “It was a massive undertaking.”
James Dobbins is a journalist based in the Bay Area. His work has been published in The New York Times, Texas Observer, Texas Monthly and alt-weeklies.
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