A 13-year-old boy, as well as a 19-year-old woman and 21-year-old man, died of a fentanyl overdose last weekend in the Texas town of Wichita Falls. A few days ago, 15-year-old athlete Noah Rodríguez lost his life in the same way in Hays County, also in Texas; He was the fourth teenager in the area’s school district to die during the summer from an overdose of this drug, 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin.
The unfortunate end of these very young children has attracted the attention of the media and American society above all, and has finished triggering the alarms of their authorities for what is already a serious national problem. While gun shootings are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents up to the age of 19, fentanyl use is the leading cause of death among adults aged 18 to 45, according to a report by Families Against Fentanyl.
Many turn to Snapchat, TikTok, and other social networks to purchase the pills
According to data released by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy in an apparition in late July, “Fentanyl is killing more than 200 Americans every day.”
Last year, the DEA, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, seized 20 million counterfeit pills for a total of 6,900 kilos of the drug, enough to prepare 440 million lethal doses. Also in 2021, fentanyl caused 64% of the 100,000 overdose deaths recorded in the country; two out of three people who have died from taking opioids have been victims of that and other similar drugs.
Its consumption is the leading cause of death among adults between 18 and 45, according to the Families Against Fentanyl association.
The boom of this substance is clearly reflected in a recent study by the University of California, San Francisco, according to which in the last quarter of 2021 alone, police seized more than two million fake pills filled with fentanyl.
One form of selling that most concerns the DEA is that which makes pills look like candy. It is the so-called rainbow fentanyl, presented in pills of different colors, shapes and sizes, sometimes with a sheen that makes them more attractive to the eyes of minors. “We see a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to encourage addiction between children and young adults,” says agency administrator Anne Milgram.
The dangerous substance accounted for 64% of the 100,000 overdose deaths registered in the country
While many adult users may know that the pills they buy from street markets actually contain fentanyl, young people are more likely to believe they are buying genuine pharmaceuticals, the researchers say.
One of the scientists who conducted the study at the University of California, Morgan Godvin, pointed out the enormous lethality of fentanyl compared to other narcotics. This is demonstrated by the fact that there are more and more deaths from overdose despite consumption having just increased or, depending on the age group and the period taken as a reference, has even decreased. For example, while drug use between the ages of 14 and 18 in California has declined over the past decade, overdose deaths among these teens have increased from 492 in 2019 to 1,146 in 2021.
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Online shopping is the main source of fentanyl supply among young people in the United States Many turn to Snapchat, TikTok and other social networks to buy Percocet, Xanax and other pills which, according to the police, are often mixed with fatal doses of fentanyl. .
The drug can kill the future of the United States.
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