“I had five brothers. One of them had a hard time. I miss him every day,” Orange County Congressional candidate Scott Baugh said, as the camera panned to a framed photo of five boys with crew cuts, big smiles and button-down shirts.
“Addiction doesn't care if you're Republican or Democrat,” Baugh said. “It's a disease that affects millions of people, and it's personal to me.”
of advertisementThe New York Times episode, which begins airing Wednesday, will be the first time that Baugh, 62, has spoken publicly about his brother, who died from fentanyl in 2020. Baugh has said his top priority in Congress will be addressing the fentanyl epidemic.
The ad adds a deeply personal touch to the tight race for coastal Orange County's 47th Congressional District, one of a handful nationwide that is seen as pivotal in determining which party controls the House of Representatives after the November election.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine) ran for Senate instead of seeking reelection, but lost in the primary, leaving the district without an incumbent candidate. Baugh, a former chair of the Orange County Republican Party, lost to Porter by 3.4 percentage points in the 2022 midterm elections. Baugh will face state Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine) in November.
In an interview, Beau struggled to maintain his composure as he spoke about his brother, Randy, who he described as an outgoing man who loved to cook for friends and strangers, often baking chocolate chip cookies on Saturday nights.
“He was the kind of guy who would literally give the shirt off his back if needed, whether he needed it or not,” Bo said. “He had a servant heart.”
Baugh said Randy became addicted to prescription painkillers after having back surgery about 10 years ago, and his family tried for years to help him, even sending him to drug rehabilitation programs twice.
Randy's adult children found him unconscious in his Orange County home in the spring of 2020. He died at age 56.
Addiction “is kind of an abstract issue until you see how it ruins a life,” Baugh said. “You realize this is not a situation where you can just tell someone to get back up. You can't tell someone to get up on their own. Most of the time, they don't have the ability to do that.”
About 75,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses last year, including 6,850 in California, according to federal and state health officials.
Fentanyl has become an election issue, primarily used by Republicans to criticize the Biden administration and Democrats for not doing enough to stop illegal immigration and secure the border.
But only a handful of politicians have made the humanitarian tragedy of the opioid crisis an election issue, and even fewer have spoken about losing a loved one to an overdose.
Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat running for governor of North Carolina, The ad was released This summer, a film was made about a grieving mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose, and in a key Senate race in Pennsylvania, Republican Dave McCormick criticized incumbent Sen. Bob Casey for failing to address the crisis. He quoted the local sheriff. His son died of a drug overdose in 2020.
At the urging of former President Trump, Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan agreement this year to allocate about $20 billion to strengthen the U.S.-Mexico border, including to combat drug trafficking.
During last week's presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris accused Trump of putting political gain above the well-being of the American people, saying he would “prefer to campaign on problems rather than solve them.”
Data Source U.S. Border Patrol About 90 percent of fentanyl seized at the border in recent years has been seized at legal ports of entry, and 91 percent of those seized were from U.S. citizens.
That includes about 62,000 pounds of fentanyl smuggled into California and seized by law enforcement last year, which Gov. Gavin Newsom described as “enough to kill the world's population nearly twice.”
These statistics do not reflect the drugs that are moving across the border without being seized, Baugh said.
Baugh told Congress he would address the fentanyl crisis by stopping the flow of drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We need to have strict controls on immigration, but we need to know who's coming in and what they're bringing in,” Baugh said. “We need to make sure that fentanyl, especially this poison, doesn't get brought into our country.”
After his brother's death, Beau became the founding director of an Orange County nonprofit. Fentanyl solutionThe group distributes naloxone, known under the brands Narcan and Cloxad, a nasal spray that can reverse a deadly opioid overdose if administered quickly, and trains people on how to use it.
Shane Wood, the nonprofit's executive director and a Santa Ana resident, said Baugh connected the organization with CalOptima, which administers health insurance plans for low-income residents in Orange County, and helped provide tens of thousands of additional doses of naloxone.
Wood praised Baugh for breaking the stigma of talking about fentanyl deaths, a topic he said comes up too often behind closed doors. He said the nonprofit organization does not endorse candidates in congressional races.
He said he hoped that either Minh or Bo would come forward in Parliament to advocate for “comprehensive recovery and mental health recovery services”.
He also said he hopes Bau and Minh will pressure local governments to use the money they already receive for opioid reduction to get more naloxone into the hands of people who use it.
Baugh said he would consider supporting a House bill to address addiction because it is so closely tied to homelessness in California, but he said, “We need to be careful when the federal government comes with a one-size-fits-all solution. … We need accountability structures to make sure that money is getting to the right places, to the right people, and is being used efficiently.”
