Simple Faith With Rusty George

0:00:00 - Rusty George
As a pastor, I'm constantly concerned about how to create connections beyond just the weekend services, and one of the valuable tools that we have found for achieving this at our church is our app powered by Subsplash. It's one thing to have an app. It's another thing to have an app that has the ability to allow your community to access messages, resources and even give, and Subsplash created that for us. It's become our go-to platform for connecting with our congregation in ways we never could have before. Subsplash is so much more than just a platform or even just an app. It brings people together, empowers giving and transforms lives. If you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to visit their website at subsplash.com. That's s-u-b-s-p-l-a-s-h.com, subsplash.com.

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Well, fentanyl is a growing epidemic that we're all still learning about, and I met Jaime Puerta when our church in California hosted a memorial for those lost to Fentanyl in our community. While many of us think it's just drug addicts who are dying, I think you'll learn it's much bigger than that and may be closer to home than you ever thought or imagined. Here's my conversation with Jaime Puerta.

Hey, it's great to have you. I hate that we have to talk about what we're about to talk about, but Fentanyl is such a huge issue, in our country especially, and nobody knows anything about it. It's a drug that often gets confused for something else. It's a drug that is often overlooked, but yet it's a drug that often gets inserted into other drugs that ends up killing people. This became a reality for you a few years ago with your son, so I'd love for people to know who you are and for you to tell us your story and what it is you're doing now.

0:02:09 - Jaime Puerta
Oh, thank you. First and foremost, thank you so much for inviting me to your podcast. I think that I just want to reach as many people as possible and, via this podcast, I think a lot of people will be a lot more educated than they were before on this, and that's why I'm here. And again, thank you for the invitation. My name is Jaime Puerta. I am the president of VOID: Victims of Illicit Drugs. You can find us at stopthevoid.org. The reason why I got into this space was because I had suffered a tragedy in my own family when my own 16 and a half year old son, Daniel Puerta Johnson, passed away on April, the 6th of 2020, due to fentanyl poisoning, and I really didn't know what fentanyl was at the time, and I had to dig deep and to find out exactly what was happening.

First, let me tell you a little bit about who Daniel was. Daniel was just a normal kid like anybody else. Daniel was a precocious, outgoing but, at the same time, very, very shy type of kid. He was very intelligent. He was just a very, very smart kid. He was the kind of young man that would take his shirt off to help anybody out. He was the kind of kid who would watch a commercial from SPCA, the animals, the dogs, the orphan dogs and orphan cats, and you could see his eyes well up with tears. He had more friends that were girls, than were boys, because they said, one, he was really really handsome, but two, that he gave the best boyfriend advice in the world, so they would go to him. And he was a perfect student. I guess you could say well, not perfect, because nobody is perfect but he was like straight A's and B's all up until sixth grade.

We're from here, from Santa Clarita, we live off of Plum Canyon, so he went to elementary school at Plum Canyon Elementary. Then he went to Arroyo Seco. When he went to Arroyo Seco we noticed some changes. He became disinterested or not interested at all in school, whereas before he was A and B's. Then all of a sudden his grades had dropped down to C, ds and Fs, which forced him to go to summer school, both in seventh grade, eighth grade and ninth grade. We weren't too happy about that. We were trying to figure out what was going on, took him to doctors there was no drug use at that time and he came back with ADHD and he was also diagnosed with severe depression. Now you figure, what is a kid have to be depressed about in Santa Clarita, and we live in a middle to upper middle class city and you would think that we give these kids everything they want. So what would make them depressed? Well, it's not necessarily an outside factor that makes you depressed, it's just that it could be in your genes and unfortunately, in my family we have a lot of that. My own mother died of alcoholism when she was only 45 years old, so Daniel was then. When we got the, when we received the diagnoses of both ADHD and severe depression, we had to get them on medication, which has happened to be okay for him. It worked out.

In ninth grade, when he was in summer school, he was at Canyon Country High School doing summer school there, and Daniel at that time was a pretty big kid. He was six foot one, weighed 220 pounds, and one of the teachers there was a high school football coach and he goes. You have to play football. So he got in contact with Coach Bornn over at Saugus High School and talked to him about Daniel. And so, Daniel, when Daniel started his 10th grade at Saugus High School, he joined the football team and he absolutely loved it. He was with the cool kids, he was popular with the girls. His grades got up. They were no longer Cs and Ds, they were getting to Cs and Bs. So we were really, really, truly happy of what was happening.

But once football season was over, it seemed like everything turned very dark and very quickly he began experimenting first with marijuana and then he got into Xanax and it got to the point where, because California is the way it is, we couldn't put him in a rehab of any kind because, had he wanted to check himself out, he could have. So we sent him to a place called Wingate Wilderness Therapy in Canab, utah, and it was the best thing that could ever ever happen to him. He was there for two months with a bunch of other boys hiking through the Zion National Park, learning life skills, learning how to do fires, how to cook for himself. And when I went and saw him and went six weeks in, I could see and I experienced. I got my son back. I got my son back. I got the old Daniel back, and all he said to me because I can't wait to get back, because I need to catch up.

He was a year behind in high school work, so he worked his tail end off and he caught up to his grade. He was thriving, he was doing great and then on the pandemic hit. And the pandemic hit on March 15th and we feel that that really did a number on him because he wasn't able to socialize with his friends, he couldn't be with his girlfriend, he was locked away in his bedroom six, seven, eight hours a day just doing work and then that night playing with video games but not being able to socialize, and we feel that that had a tremendous effect on his mental health. And unfortunately, on March 31st he reached out to a drug dealer on Snapchat and bought what he thought was a Blue M30 oxycodone pill. But what was delivered to him was a fake pill, a counterfeit pill made to look exactly like an oxycodone pill. He consumed half of that on the evening of March 30th and when I walked into his bedroom on April the first, I found my son in a position or I saw something that no parent should ever see and that's the lifeless body of your own child.

Horrible, horrible, horrible. I mean, it was just. You know, it was just. I was in the Marine Corps. I'm a Marine Corps veteran. I can tell you, even though I didn't see war. I still saw some pretty gnarly things, but I lived in Columbia as well and lived through the trafficking wars with Pablo Escobar and all that, and I'd seen a lot of death, but I had never seen anything like that. So seeing your own son lifeless that way was pretty tremendous, hard on me and my sister and my wife and but anyways, I called the emergency services.

They picked them up. They first took them to Henry Mayo Hospital and then from Henry Mayo they sent him to... They took him to Los Angeles Children's Hospital where later that night a team of doctors came and told us that you know that, Daniel, there was nothing they could do for him, that all they could really do is keep him comfortable, that he was in a very deep coma, he had lost all his brain function and the only thing that was working for him was just his breathing, and even that needed help, and but that they were gonna keep him comfortable until we decided that we didn't want to continue with keeping him on life support. So that was about April 1st. Both Denise Johnson, his biological mother, and I stayed with him every single night.

I came home that first night and found half a pill on top of his dresser and I took that with me to the hospital the next day. They sent that to the Santa Clarita Sheriff's Station and we're a detective picked up, should I say, from the hospital. They did an analysis on it in two weeks after Daniel's passing approximately two weeks, I detected from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, came to my home and when I asked what took my son's life, they said we're very sorry, Mr. Puerta, but your son died of an overdose. They go an overdose. And I go, yeah, what did he overdose on? He goes well, he overdosed on fentanyl. But I started thinking, Pastor Rusty, I go. I found half a pill that, looked through my research, looked exactly like a blue M30 oxycodone pill. And I asked the detective, and I go, well, it looks like what my son was consuming was an M30, a blue M30 oxycodone pill. So how do you figure that fentanyl was in it? He goes, well, it was a counterfeit. I go well, then, by you saying that then it wasn't an overdose, it was a poisoning, because Daniel was not trying to consume fentanyl. Daniel was trying to consume a blue M30 oxycodone pill and that's what he consumed. He consumed half of it and it took his life.

Once I found out what had taken his life, I went onto the internet, and I came across thousands upon thousands of other families across this nation who had also lost their very young children to this poisoning, to this, to this, and then so I started. I started really researching this and the reason why we have so many young people dying. Well, first and foremost, let me go back a little bit. Most parents feel like this can never happen to them due to the stigma of addiction and overdose. Most people feel like this can never, ever happen to them because their children do not use drugs on a recreational basis or are not addicted to drugs.

What parents fail to realize, though, is that there are a lot of outside factors that will want, or will make a child want to go out and try drugs, whether that be self-medicating, due to stress at home between mom and dad, parents are going through a divorce, children are stressed out, their relationships with their friends are not so good, their grades are suffering, so they're stressed out about that. Emotional trauma, physical trauma A whole host of reasons why a child will want to do drugs. Another thing, too, is that I don't know why, but this generation of children just doesn't seem to be equipped with the correct coping skills to be able to overcome very stressful situations. So, when they don't have coping skills and they have this kind of stress in their life, they're going to want to self-medicate or they're going to want to try drugs. Because, believe it or not, a study just came out where children between the ages of 11 and 17 will rest who is your biggest influence in your life your parents, your teachers or your friends? 92.5% of them responded your friends. So when you have a 14-year-old boy talking to another 14-year-old boy saying, hey, why don't you take this? It made me feel really good. They're going to follow that advice and while you're off at work, they just might reach out to that drug dealer through a social media app like Snapchat or Instagram and buy that pill. So this is what's happening in today's day and age is that many of our children like.

In 2021 alone, we had 107,611 drug deaths in the United States. 80,214 of those drug deaths were due to fentanyl and fentanyl related substances. Really, 11,000 of those 80,000 were children between the ages of zero to 17. Think about that, wow. So you're talking about a 911 event almost every two to two and a half weeks in this country and yet nothing is being done. Quite frankly, much is done about it and I feel like we're failing as a society in warning these children. And, again, due to the stigma of addiction and overdose, parents are not talking to their kids and, quite frankly, the whole drug supply in the United States has now been tainted with fentanyl.

0:14:01 - Rusty George
Okay. So let me ask you this, because I mean you say a 911 event every two and a half weeks. I mean that is that is mind boggling, and the fact that we're not hearing about it at all. Is it because we just assume this is somebody else's problem? We just assume my kids aren't into drugs? I'm not into drugs, but what you're telling me is it's not like people are going out and I'm sure there are but the normal amount of people going out buying drugs aren't looking for fentanyl, they're just obtaining it and they don't even know it.

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0:15:04 - Jaime Puerta
So they're obtaining it without their knowledge or without their consent. So it's not that the drug dealers are trying to kill their customers. What they're trying to do is they're trying to drive the addiction into them. So they are lacing cocaine like recreational drugs, like cocaine and black market cannabis, and I'll explain to you a little bit more about that in a minute. But remember, not too long ago, last year, we had four comedians in Venice Beach and all of them had gone out and three of them died, and it was all due to fentanyl poisoning, if you think about, and they had all consumed cocaine. Just a day before yesterday, on the Macy's Garage parking lot they found a gentleman who had been in his car Dead for two days, and now they came to find out that it was an overdose, which was probably fentanyl just right here in Santa Clarita.

And I can tell you that many, many, many children between the ages high school kids last year alone I mean from Saugas High School and I know from Valencia High School have passed away. I won't mention her names because I don't have their parents permission to state their names. We had a girl in Central Park during concerts at the park who dropped dead and it turns out she was 17 years old. She did a line of cocaine not knowing that it was fentanyl in that cocaine and it killed her. And two weeks later a young man who was just graduating from Saugas High School, his brother found him dead in his bedroom due to fentanyl poisoning. And again, it's not that these kids are trying to find fentanyl, it's just that fentanyl is absolutely everything. We also live in a society that has normalized pill taking in the United States to such a degree that you turn on daytime TV and that's all you see are commercials about when a drug either for rashes or for cancer or for diabetes or a whole host of other problems, and or their parents themselves are taking synthetic opioids like oxycodone or oxycontin or percoset because of work related accidents. Or there's just people in our you know, in our society who live with the most, you know, unimaginable pain that they need to take very strong pain pills or even have fentanyl patches, and that's. There's a difference between prescribed fentanyl and illicit fentanyl, right? The prescribed fentanyl has been around since 1959. They use it in the operating rooms and emergency rooms all across the nation for people who have suffered the most horrendous physical injuries.

The illicit fentanyl that we're talking about, I know one of the precursors to it is AANP4 and then a whole host of other chemicals that they put in it. But it's not. There's, no, there is no quality control into making these pills and nobody is measuring the amount of fentanyl that you put into cocaine. So for them I mean, if their customer dies, that's just the cost of doing business. And for those who don't die, they become addicted to it almost immediately because it's 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and heroin.

So a lot of these children are dying and and not because they want to die, it's because they've been deceived. They've been deceived. You know. And again, these kids, whether you like it or not, they're very curious and you know we have music that normalizes it. We have a culture that's normalized drug use. They want to be cool, they want to belong to a certain group of friends, or again they're stressed out. You know, or there's problems at home, or they're having problems with their relationships and they're going to want to try. But unfortunately these are not the drugs the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s or even the early 2000s. It's because the whole drug supply has been tainted with fentanyl.

0:18:55 - Rusty George
So this tragedy happens in your life. You begin to get educated very quickly as to what's going on. What happened to your son? What was your next step? Was it the documentary that you put out? I'd love for you to tell our listeners about that. Was it to start an organization you decided it is now going to be your life mission to get the word out so that people don't have to suffer this way like you have.

0:19:20 - Jaime Puerta
That's correct. Well, one of the first things that we did is I found other parents here in southern California who had suffered the same fate as I had, who had lost their children too, like Alexander Neville, 14 years old skateboarder kid from Aliso Viejo, California you know, a surf town type kid just had to skate park.

One knucklehead 14 year old and takes a pill and dies, you know? Steve Filson's daughter, Jessica Filson, who ordered a gram of cocaine to celebrate the the finding of an apartment, who got her life together in this, now want to celebrate, the cocaine was tainted. Or you know, Matt Capoloto, whose daughter, Alexandra, straight-a student from Arizona University, suffered from insomnia, orders of Percocet on snapchat and where was it? Oxycodone and it was fake pill. Then she dies. So we got together with these parents in. The first thing that we did is we we toured Southern California. We visited the county sheriff's at that time. We visited Alex Villenueva, who's the county sheriff, Los Angeles County. Sheriff Golf, I think was his name from San Diego County. Sheriff Barnes from Orange County. A sheriff Bianca from Riverside. Into five of us, or four parents. We went there with eight by ten pictures of our children. We explained to our children were in life and one by one, we started seeing the light bulb going off in their brains. Is that? Wait a minute? You know, Houston, we have a problem Because when law enforcement sees these deaths, they equate them to overdoses. And if they equate them as an overdose right off the bat, they're not going to investigate. So what these sheriff's departments did to credit up their own once they heard of us. Once they heard our stories, they began fentanyl task forces and they started prosecuting not the persons who were addicted to drugs, but started prosecuting the drug dealers, people who go around, who are like mass murderers, in my own opinion, going around in a car, getting a message on Snapchat, going to a home and delivering these pills. So that's the first thing we did.

And then I was very fortunate to be a part of a documentary called Dead on Arrival that was directed by Dominic Tierda, who was produced by Christine Wood out of Orange County, who saw Amy Neville's story from Elisiuviehu against Alexander, and then she invited myself, Steve and Matt Capilota to be a part of this documentary. And basically what the documentary does it features four families. All four families went through the same tragedy that I did, of course, and we talk about what happened to our children. And it basically has been used across the nation for educating both children and parents alike and raising awareness in our communities about the dangers of any kind of drug use. And once children see that, they understand that they have to be very careful, like here.

I know for that, the William S Hart School District. The documentary was shown to all of them, all of the schools in Orange County. I know CME Valley School District also did the same thing and has been shown across the nation. Again, I've been everywhere with this documentary and also I do also parent fentanyl seminar nights where we'll get parents in an auditorium and I'll give them a presentation. I'll show the documentary first and then I'll go in to a PowerPoint which I promise is not boring but really enlightens them of what exactly they're dealing with and why children would want to use drugs and what parents any quick parents with the tools that they will need so that their families do not suffer the same tragedy that mine did so.

0:23:01 - Rusty George
you mentioned that you're headed to the White House soon. You've worked with them in the past. You've been on all kinds of national television shows to discuss this. What's your objective when you get to the White House, working with the team there?

0:23:13 - Jaime Puerta
Well, that's a great question. That's a fantastic question. So, yes, I was invited to the White House for August 31st, which is National Drug Overdose Awareness Day, and it talks about all kinds of drugs. We want to kind of distinguish it Not that we're stigmatizing people who overdose on drugs, that are addicted to drugs, but we want to clear that, draw a line. That's clear distinction the fentanyl poisoning as well, because a lot of again, a lot of these kids are being deceived to death.

One of the things I want to ask them for is money. I want to ask them for money because there's a lot of what they call these drug coalitions who have been tasked in our cities to bring the education to children. But there's certain and they apply for these grants, but these grants come with a lot of strings attached, where they have to fulfill so many hours of drug education in schools, handing out in a lock zone, which is a medicine that reverts or reverses a drug, an opioid, overdose or poisoning, and so our foundations, foundations made up of bereaved parents we really don't fall in any kind of one category, so we're like the stepchild that doesn't fit in everywhere. We just don't fit in and we don't qualify for any of the grants that are out there. So we want to ask them, probably if how we can get some funding, because it's expensive traveling around the country and getting this education into schools. We've been very, very blessed. We just paired up.

San Bernardino County has a giant fentanyl initiative and they partnered with victims of illicit drugs with our foundation, so we're very, very happy about that. We just recently partnered with the Los Angeles Police Department as well, where we're going into underprivileged neighborhoods in Compton and Hawthorne Watts where there's public housing and they have a huge, huge drug gang problem where the gangs are actively recruiting kids into the gangs and having them self-engined and things like that. So we're going into these high schools as well and presenting there and also the documentaries. Also it's in Spanish, so I'm bilingual, so I give these seminars in Spanish as well. But the White House it'll be my second time there. I was there last year as well and, if anything, we just want the administration to listen to us. We want them to give us some kind of funding so that we can continue doing what we're doing. I have a full-time job. I have my own business and you know how it is to run a business.

I'm sure, running a parish this big has all of its challenges as well. So if I could dedicate myself 100% of the time to this and I would do so, but I have to make a living. I still have a family to provide for my wife and Daniel's mom. My family unit now is my wife, Daniel's mom and my sister. That's us and that's who I gotta take care of and I gotta make sure they're okay too. But our foundation has been doing a lot. We have really accomplished a lot in the short time that we've been in existence, since June of 2021. And again, all we wanna do is just raise the awareness in our communities and educate families and just let them know that we're not trying to scare them, but we need them to be understand that one mistake is all that it takes for a child to lose his or her life. And our children are not supposed to die from their mistakes. They're supposed to learn from them. They're supposed to learn from them.

0:26:59 - Rusty George
Your wristband says one pill, one line, one time. That's how quick it can be.

0:27:06 - Jaime Puerta
That's how quick it can be. All you need is two milligrams or more of fentanyl in there and you're dead, and you're gone.

0:27:11 - Rusty George
Tell me where people can find out more.

0:27:14 - Jaime Puerta
People can find out more at stopthevoidorg. Again, that is stopthevoidorg. You could go onto our website. The documentary is front and center. I just gave a presentation to 300 mental health professionals from the Los Angeles Unified School District who watched this documentary and they were blown away. These mental health counselors are the ones who are in charge of the PSWs. What they call them is psychological social workers in both junior highs and high schools all throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District. We are partnering with them now and they're going to start watching documentary.

A lot of these teachers and mental health advocates came up to me afterwards and say I'm sitting down with my children tonight. I will not go another night without watching this documentary with them. Thank you so much. You're helping save lives and it's not that everything that I do is not on a foundation of ego or anything like that.

I get emotional, but had it not been for my faith in God that he's using myself and the other parents for a better, I'm not going to let my son's death go in vain. His death cannot go in vain. There has to be a reason behind it, and I feel like it is us to try and just to bring this education awareness about. That is what our purpose on life is. It's not every day that you wake up, and not too many people wake up every day knowing what they have to do on that day to get by. I do every day. I get up, I know what I need to do, and so I could use all the help possible. And you go to stopthevoid.org you can donate to us too. We're a 501C, so it would be truly appreciative. And please, please, please, if anything, watch the documentary with your teenagers.

0:29:02 - Rusty George
I highly recommend that. I've seen it. It's fantastic. It's 20 minutes or something, that's correct. Yeah, I mean what a valuable use of time for parents and their kids especially, but to watch it together, talk about it, hear what their kids have to say, educate them as well as yourself, and this has been a joy to have you on the podcast.

Thank you, man. I'm grateful to have reconnected with you at our Fentanyl Awareness event we did here at the church, absolutely, but praying for you and what's next for you and the way God's using you to help save a lot of lives.

0:29:36 - Jaime Puerta
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you and all your listeners. Thank you so much for listening to me and remember, not that I wanted to, but this can also affect your families, and your best weapon against this evil is education and awareness. You have to know what's going on and also be very aware of what your children are doing on their cell phones.

0:29:56 - Rusty George
Oh, definitely, stopthevoid.org. That's correct. Thank you so much. Thank you Well, thank you to Jaime and thank you to you for listening, and maybe somebody in your world could benefit from hearing his story and checking out some of their resources. Thank you to Sub Splash for sponsoring the podcast today. It's been a difficult topic, but one that we did want to simplify a little bit to help us understand it so that out of understanding we could find and bring healing. Make sure you subscribe and share the podcast and, as always, leave a review, and we'll be back next week with a conversation that it's just me and I'm going to be telling my story a little bit and why I decided it was time for me to leave Real Life Church. We'll be back next week, as always. Keep it simple.