Fentanyl Is Killing Us

In the ugly history of illicit drugs, no drug is more deadly than fentanyl. 

Not cocaine.

Not meth

Not heroin.

Every day, fentanyl kills over 200 Americans; rich, poor, black, white, old, young. Especially young.

Fentanyl is a cheap synthetic opioid that is incredibly dangerous for two reasons:

First, it’s FIFTY TIMES stronger than heroin. Just a sugar packet’s worth of fentanyl would kill over 500 people. 

Second, fentanyl is used to create counterfeit versions of popular prescription drugs. These fake pills look identical to the real ones—Xanax, Adderall, Oxycontin, Percocet, and others. You can’t see, smell, or taste the difference. Even agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, can’t tell the difference between the real pill and the counterfeit one.

Fentanyl isn’t just deadly poison. It’s deadly poison in disguise, and most kids who die from it had no idea they were even taking it. 

13-year-old Luca Manuel is one of those kids.

In August 2020, Luca went on Snapchat, a social media app popular for drug sales because messages are anonymous and instantly disappear. 

He bought what he thought was a Percocet from a dealer.

Hours later, Luca was found dead in his bedroom from fentanyl poisoning.

His mom Amanda said that “It was no Percocet. It wasn’t even mixed with Percocet. He only had fentanyl in his system.”

Amanda still can’t believe that her son is gone. “The last time I held my son was in a body bag.”

Tasha Edwards knows Amanda’s pain.

Her daughter, Breanna, 18, had just graduated from high school. To celebrate she went to a weekend party with friends. When Tasha hadn’t heard from her for more than 12 hours, she got frantic. 

She asked her eldest daughter to scour social media for any information about where Breanna might be.

They soon got their answer: an Instagram photo of Breanna with the caption, “OMG I lost my best friend last night.”

Later, Tasha found out that Breanna had been offered a pill at the party. She was told it was Percocet, and she and her friend split it.

Breanna was dead within hours, but her friend survived. How is that possible? Counterfeit pills are made so sloppily that one part of a pill can contain a lethal dose of fentanyl, while the other doesn’t.

“A lot of people feel like when this happens it’s happening to bad kids or troubled kids or kids who are addicts,” Tasha said. “My daughter had never popped pills. I didn’t know about fentanyl until I read it on my daughter’s death certificate.”

Mexican drug cartels are responsible for spreading this poison. They create fentanyl with chemical compounds imported from China. They use this fentanyl to give their newly pressed counterfeit pills their potency.

These pills are then moved across the border to dealers all over the U.S.

You might be asking, why do the cartels make a drug that kills off many of their customers?

The answer is money. 

It costs cartels only 10 cents to produce a counterfeit pill that can then be sold for 10 dollars in the United States. Those profits are enormous. A thousand dead kids a year—or a hundred thousand dead kids—hardly matters to them. They’re just collateral damage, a business expense.

Tiffany Iler, 21, was a pre-med junior at Ohio State. In May 2022, Tiffany’s father had planned to pick her up after finals.

Sadly, before he arrived, she had died in her apartment, alongside her best friend Jessica Lopez, a computer science major. They had taken what they thought was Adderall—a prescription drug that college students have been known to use to boost their concentration.

But a coroner’s report showed that both Tiffany and Jessica had actually died of fentanyl poisoning. They had no Adderall in their systems.

How do we stop this scourge?

Every young man and woman needs to be aware of the risks of experimenting with drugs in the age of fentanyl. Fentanyl has completely changed the game. Experimenting with pills has never been deadlier because the drug supply has never been deadlier: in 2023, 7 in 10 counterfeit pills seized by the DEA contained a lethal dose of fentanyl.

So:

Do not accept any pill of any kind if it didn’t come from a doctor or pharmacist. Even if your best friend offers you a pill, it could contain fentanyl, and they wouldn’t even know it. 

Take that pill—make a single bad choice—and you could wake up dead.

In the age of fentanyl, your life is a coin toss. Heads, you get high. Tails, you die.

The only way to win this twisted game is to refuse to play.

I’m James Fishback, founder of NEO: The New Drug Talk, for Prager University.