As described in a recent Noozhawk commentary, I lost a friend to a fentanyl overdose.
His name was Tim. He was 31, unhoused and fighting every day to stay alive. His death is one face of a much larger crisis.
As former Santa Barbara County Supervisor Das Williams noted recently, our county lost 493 people in all wars and conflicts over the past 163 years — yet 539 residents died from drug overdoses in just the last three years.
In a follow-up piece, I laid out what our community needs to know about fentanyl: its potency, its prevalence, and the ways it is reshaping the landscape of addiction and risk in our county.
What I’ve learned since then is even more disturbing. Young homeless men in our city are dying at a terrible rate.
All this has happened while the county’s homeless death review team went dormant, failing to systematically collect and analyze data for the last three or four years.
Only after persistent questioning did the new Public Health Department director agree to relaunch the team.
With numbers like these, it’s easy to reach for a simple conclusion: our community just isn’t doing enough.
My worry is that we jump to that judgment without fully understanding how our existing systems are failing and what would actually count as “enough” for those at the sharpest edge of this crisis.
Tim was what I call “triple-challenged”: he was homeless, living with a serious mental health disorder and self-medicating with street drugs.
When I try to imagine what it would have taken for him to get the help he needed, all I see are barriers. He had only the shirt on his back — no food stamps, no Medi-Cal, no phone, no car, and no safe place to sleep.
He cycled in and out of jail. Getting to the public health clinic at the county’s Calle Real Complex and back to downtown Santa Barbara now costs $5 in bus fare, a significant sum when you’re hungry and broke.
Tim didn’t die because there were absolutely no services available … He died because the help he needed was at the end of a maze he was never going to be able to run.
The medication-assisted treatment he needed — Suboxone — would have required three clinic appointments, booked and remembered without a phone, a calendar or reliable transportation.
Our county is woefully short of treatment beds. Wait lists are often 30 to 60 days long — an eternity when you are using daily and overdosing is a constant possibility.
CADA’s Adult Residential Treatment Services, located downtown, has 12 beds. Paying clients are admitted first; those hoping for a scholarship bed may wait even longer.
Some programs expect people to call every day to remain on the list, a policy that might make sense on paper but is profoundly misaligned with the lived reality of people sleeping in doorways and encampments.
These protocols may look “reasonable” when viewed from an office. From Tim’s vantage point, they were impossible.
His auditory hallucinations were relentless. He was often malnourished and sleep-deprived.
Every day was crisis management: Where do I sleep tonight? Where do I find food? How do I stay safe?
The cognitive load of survival left little bandwidth for navigating multistep bureaucratic processes that even housed, resourced people find challenging.
My point is not that our county has no services for this population. We can point to hotlines, clinics, residential programs and outreach teams.
My point is that the barriers built into these services — transportation costs, documentation requirements, long wait lists, daily check-in demands, abstinence preconditions, and fragmented systems for mental health, addiction and housing — render them virtually inaccessible for someone like Tim.
We have created a system that works well enough for people who are already relatively stable. For the triple-challenged, it might as well be a locked door.
I don’t believe we can fix this by anecdotes and outrage alone. If we are going to say, honestly and publicly, that Santa Barbara County is not doing enough, we need to substantiate that claim with careful comparison and research.
How many low-barrier treatment beds do comparable counties have per capita?
How do other communities organize street-level medication-assisted treatment? What are they doing with jail-based MAT, post-release follow-up, and immediate placement into treatment or housing?
How are they funding and staffing their overdose prevention and harm-reduction work?
That’s why I’m looking to form a small working group of people committed to doing this homework together. I’m imagining a coalition of outreach workers, clinicians, people with lived experience of homelessness and addiction, family members, data-savvy volunteers, and anyone else who is tired of watching friends and neighbors die while our systems move slowly.
Our task would be to map the barriers here at home, study what’s working elsewhere, and bring forward concrete, evidence-based recommendations for how Santa Barbara County can reduce overdose deaths among the most vulnerable.
Tim didn’t die because there were absolutely no services available to him. He died because the help he needed was at the end of a maze he was never going to be able to run.
If we are serious about saving lives, we have to stop congratulating ourselves on services that look good on a flowchart but are unreachable on the street. We need systems designed around the realities of the triple-challenged, not around the convenience of administrators.
If you’re interested in being part of that work — researching models, gathering data, and helping push for systemic change — please reach out at SBOverdoseWorkingGroup@gmail.com.
For Tim’s sake, and for the many others walking the same fragile edge he did, we owe them more than memorials. We owe them a system they can actually reach in time.