Overdosing Teens Become Tragic Symbol of Fentanyl Crisis

The fentanyl problem has plagued America over the past few years because the migrant crisis has allowed the opioid to be trafficked over the open southern border. As the White House flounders for solutions, more Americans are losing their lives to the drug.

A new report suggests the situation is even more pressing as teenagers are being affected. If this issue persists, more pressure will likely come to bear on the Biden administration to take action.

Fentanyl Claiming the Lives of Teens

Teen overdose deaths have doubled in just three years, despite a historic decline in drug and alcohol use among high school students, according to The Hill. The cause of this alarming trend is the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Many teens unknowingly consume fentanyl, packaged in counterfeit pills designed to resemble less-potent prescription medications.

Drug traffickers use this practice to enhance the high, but the powerful opioid is dangerously addictive and lethal, especially to children experimenting with drugs. In 2021, drug and alcohol-related deaths among children aged 15 to 19 increased to 1,755, up from 788 in 2018, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A 2022 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that between 2010 and 2021, the number of adolescent deaths from black-market fentanyl and related synthetics rose more than 20-fold, from 38 to 884. This study identified fentanyl as the leading cause of teen overdose death, followed by the class of depressants known as benzodiazepines, which claimed 152 lives in 2021, less than one-fifth of fentanyl’s toll.

“Fentanyl, it’s just a different beast,” said Dr. Hoover Adger Jr., a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “And it’s so deadly. You have a milligram of fentanyl being equivalent to 50 milligrams of heroin, being equivalent to 100 milligrams of morphine. And right now, fentanyl is creeping into everything.”

The potency of fentanyl means that it can trigger a fatal overdose in much smaller quantities than less powerful drugs. This fact is a significant reason why the number of US drug overdose deaths doubled in six years, from 52,404 in 2015 to 106,699 in 2021.

Well-versed on the opioid epidemic, adolescents are typically aware of the danger of addiction and have little access to prescription medications such as oxycodone. However, with black-market fentanyl, in many cases teenage customers do not know that they are buying it.

The rise in overdose deaths comes at a time when, paradoxically, teen drug and alcohol use is in decline. Between 2002 and 2022, the share of 12th-grade students who used illicit drugs dropped from 21% to 8%, according to the national Monitoring the Future study. Similarly, the share of 12th-grade students drinking alcohol dwindled from 72% in 2002 to 52% in 2022.

The successful anti-drug campaign also extends to prescription opioids, which are much less accessible to teens than they were 10 or 20 years ago due to a national push to limit the number of pills prescribed and to secure the tablets in blister packs.

Despite these positive trends, the dramatic rise in overdose deaths illustrates the lethal potency of fentanyl, addiction experts say. “If you magically removed fentanyl from the drug supply, these deaths would absolutely plummet,” said Dr. Michael Toce, an instructor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Is There a Solution Forthcoming?

The Republican takeover of the House shifted congressional oversight of the border, with GOP lawmakers using their new powers to link the fentanyl crisis to illegal migration.

Fentanyl has increased the stakes in the decades-long drug war, inflaming the pre-existing opiate crisis and bickering over border security, with a heightened lethality not shared by other recreational drugs.

While Democrats claim the southern border isn’t a substantial contributor to the fentanyl problem, the GOP has put a spotlight on the opioid, portraying it as the connective tissue among immigration, crime, border chaos, and the overdose epidemic.

In recent weeks the drug has been a fixture in GOP hearings, with House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) claiming “backpacks full of fentanyl [are] pouring into our country” while border officers are stretched thin with other urgent migrant issues. As a street drug, fentanyl is produced by clandestine labs in Mexico from chemical precursors sourced from China, according to the State Department’s 2022 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. The drug killed some 70,000 Americans last year, part of a growing trend of synthetic opioids that now account for more than three-quarters of all overdose deaths.

Unfortunately, it appears Republicans and Democrats are at odds with how to address the continuing issue with the flow of fentanyl into the country. Republicans see the opioid epidemic as a border and law enforcement issue, with some in the GOP saying the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to stop Mexican drug cartels from bringing fentanyl into the country.

The White House contends it has a record number of personnel working to secure the border, noting they seized 23,000 pounds of fentanyl in the last several months. Other than that, the Biden team has not yet articulated a comprehensive plan to solve the problem. After having eliminated most of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, the president is struggling to figure out a different way to protect Americans from the opioid.

Restarting some of those more effective programs might hurt Biden politically, so he is unlikely to take that route. Unfortunately, more men, women, and children will perish as the White House searches for a method that might actually save lives.