All In One Day!

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. Just two milligrams of the drug, equivalent to 10-15 grains of table salt, is enough to kill an adult.

Illegally made fentanyl, usually mixed with heroin or cocaine, is the leading cause of overdoses and deaths in the United States. Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before.

To get a better feel for the scope of the problem, I read about the following all in the same day.

-Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn is all too familiar with the destruction that is fentanyl -in the Dallas/Fort Worth area alone, the narcotics teams have seized enough of the drug to give almost 800,000 people fatal doses, he says, while on the Texas border, DPS has seized enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman and child in America. These seizures are roughly estimated as being only a third of what gets to the border, with two-thirds of the drug actually making it across the border.

-In one startling incident from February, five adults were found dead from overdosing on fentanyl in an apartment in Denver, Colorado. The only survivor was a 4-month-old baby whose parents perished in the harrowing case. “Drug distributors and drug cartels are lacing everything with fentanyl right now. No drug is safe right now,” said district attorney Brian Mason. “This scene last night looked like a mass homicide scene.”

-Arizona police found a baby in a locked room with dangerous illicit drugs after a traffic stop. A search warrant was then obtained, and subsequently Partners Against Narcotics Trafficking personnel knocked at the home and announced their entrance into the house. Once inside, they said they discovered an 18-month-old child sleeping in a locked room with 500 pills of fentanyl and a pound of methamphetamine.

-In North Carolina two women have been indicted by a grand jury after a child in their care died of a fentanyl overdose. According to the timeline of events, the two women smoked meth together, then picked up Kingston, an 18 month old toddler. When the baby fell asleep, one of the women gave her friend some fentanyl. Both women used the drug and then fell asleep. When they awoke, the toddler was unresponsive and was later pronounced dead at the hospital. The cause of death was a lethal dose of fentanyl.

-Authorities in New York City arrested one person and seized nearly 15,000 “rainbow fentanyl” pills that were disguised and hidden in a LEGO box in what was the largest drug bust of its kind to date in the city.

The investigation traced the origins of those pills to Mexico and the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

-Deaths from fentanyl overdoses have soared in California among 15 to 19-year-olds since 2012, according to the California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard. California recorded 4,009 fentanyl-related deaths in 2020. According to the CDC, this was a 140.5% increase from 2019, when the state recorded 1,675 deaths. In 2020, 250 California teens ages 15 to 19 died from fentanyl overdoses. 2021 saw a slight decline to 224.

-A high school student overdosed on fentanyl and died on the floor of her high school bathroom, according to police. Another student overdosed but survived. The incident unfolded on evening of 10/4/22 at the Bernstein High School in Hollywood at about 9 p.m. A high school student overdosed on fentanyl and died on the floor of her high school bathroom, according to police. Another student overdosed but survived. Investigators said the girls had purchased pills at Lexington Park they believed wto be Percocet, or oxycodone, but they were laced with fentanyl.

-Just after 9 a.m. local time on 9/30/22, Bakersfield police were called to Chipman Junior High Schoolwhere a school supervisor had suffered an accidental fentanyl overdose after breaking up an altercation between two students. During the incident, the school employee conducted a search on one of the students involved and found nearly 150 fentanyl pills disguised as Percocet (oxycodone) pills, police said. It is unclear whether the other student had been searched as well.

Though the supervisor did not ingest any of the pills, the act of opening the pill bottle itself exposed the employee to an “inhalation hazard,” according to reports.

DEA analysis has found that 42% of counterfeit pills tested for fentanyl contained at least 2 mg of the drug, considered a potentially lethal dose. Drug traffickers typically distribute fentanyl by the kilogram. One kilogram of fentanyl, roughly two pounds, can kill 500,000 people. The amount of fentanyl reportedly seized this year alone could kill more than one billion people. 

Note that l read about all of these tragedies on the same day last week.

How many more similar stories are occurring every week that we do not hear about? 

Where is all of this fentanyl coming from? We know that most of it is coming across our southern border. So the obvious common sense question is: “Why are our borders open?” … Perhaps someone whose teenage child was killed from a fentanyl overdose should be allowed to ask our President and our Vice-President this question!

10/13/22