This is truly an unprecedented time. We're at a point right now in the United States where each week the equivalent to a classroom of high school students dies of overdose. Across the country, people might be surprised to know that youth substance use has actually been on a downward trend for 20 years. High schoolers' use of illicit substances, excluding marijuana and alcohol, is actually well below 10 percent. But their deaths have skyrocketed, in particular, in the last couple of years, and that's because of fentanyl found in fake pills and other substances.
Since about the mid-2010s, we started to see this very potent synthetic opioid called fentanyl emerge on the drug landscape, first in the heroin supply, and then it started being used by drug traffickers to produce counterfeit prescription pills. These are completely fake pills. These are not actual pharmaceutical pills that somebody's sprinkling fentanyl onto. The word "counterfeit" applies. And a lot of young adults in America are getting these pills on social media—Snapchat, WhatsApp, Discord, even Facebook Messenger. It could also be just from friends or, as they call them, "plugs," their local drug dealer that they happen to know.
Our kids think that they're real and they think that they're safe, and it's a deadly mistake. It really is an equal opportunity crisis. There are no geographic boundaries, there are no gender boundaries, there are no socioeconomic boundaries. This is something that everyone is at risk of, and everyone has a stake in making sure that we come up with better solutions.
When asked to describe the danger of fentanyl, only 58 percent of high schoolers listed fentanyl as dangerous, which is far below the number of high schoolers that said cocaine or heroin were dangerous, and about equal to as many who said cigarettes were dangerous. The problem is that 12 times more deaths are being caused by fentanyl than being caused by cocaine or heroin, yet teenagers are rating it as far less dangerous. I think kids need to realize that even if it comes from their best friend, it's most likely not safe because the drug supply right now is not safe.
