US drug agency battles ‘dangerous’ fentanyl epidemic
Virginia Beach – Makayla Cox, a high school student in the US state of Virginia, thought she was taking medication her friend had procured to treat pain and anxiety. Instead, the pill she took two weeks after her 16th birthday was fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin. It killed her almost instantly.
After watching a movie – a prequel to Harry Potter – with her mother Shannon one evening in January, Makayla appeared fine as she headed to her bedroom with her husky dog that often slept on her bed.
But when Shannon entered Makayla’s room the next morning, she found her partially sitting up, perched against the headboard, orange fluid coming out of her nose and mouth.
“She was stiff. I shook her, I screamed her name, I called 911,” Shannon said. “My neighbours came over and did CPR, but it was too late.”
America’s opioid crisis has reached catastrophic proportions, with over 80 000 people dying of overdoses last year, most due to illicit synthetics such as fentanyl – more than seven times the number a decade ago.
“This is the most dangerous epidemic we’ve seen,” said Ray Donovan, chief of operations at the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). “Fentanyl is not like any other illicit narcotic, it’s that deadly instantaneously.”
And deaths are rising especially quickly among young people, who obtain counterfeit prescription drugs through social media. Unknown to them, the pills come either laced with or made of fentanyl.
In 2019, 493 American adolescents died of drug overdose, in 2021 that figure was 1 146.
Drug dealers reach adolescents on apps such as Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and others, often using emojis as code.
Oxycodone, an opioid, may be advertised as a half-peeled banana, Xanax, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety, as a chocolate bar, and Adderall, an amphetamine that acts as a stimulant, as a train.
Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said the number of Americans doing drugs had largely stayed the same in recent years, but what had changed is how deadly they had become.
A cup of heroin is equivalent to a teaspoon of fentanyl, and less than one gram can mean the difference between life and death.
“It takes very small quantities to be a poison that can stop somebody breathing,” said Compton.
Most of the illicit fentanyl in the US is manufactured by Mexican drug cartels from chemicals shipped from China.
One kilogram of pure fentanyl can be bought for up to $12 000 (about R194 000), pressed into half a million pills that will sell for up to $30 each, Donovan said. It’s easier to smuggle in pill form.
Last year the DEA launched a campaign called “One pill can kill” to raise awareness of the dangers of fentanyl, and there are efforts to make naloxone, a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose, more easily available, including in schools.