At that time, the closed door of her teenage son’s room put her on alert. Something was wrong.
That fatalistic feeling that Shari Dukes experienced is the same one that many fathers and mothers in the United States face after tragically learning the true meaning of the word fentanyl.
And they learn that this synthetic opiate, the great plague of modernity, is 50 times stronger than heroin or 100 times more powerful than morphine.
“I knocked on the door, it was time to get up and I got no answer. I went in and shook him and he didn’t move. “It was very cold,” she recounted. Ethan, 16, was dead. They put it in a polythene bag and took it to the forensic clinic.
A while later he received the toxicology report. Her son had taken “a low dose of hydrocodone (opioid pain medication), with fentanyl, which at two milligrams is lethal,” the mother stressed.
Dukes explained his case on a Texas health administration website to warn that more and more pills contain this lethal mixture.
Initiatives like this mother’s may have contributed to overdose deaths declining for the first time since 2018, according to preliminary federal data as of the end of 2023.
This rare good news in this decades-long addiction crisis is largely attributed to the drop in deaths caused by synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl. This was emphasized by the researchers from the US National Center for Health Statistics, in charge of collecting the information.
“This progress over the last twelve months should make us want to reinvigorate our efforts knowing that our strategies are making a difference,” said Deb Houry, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US health administration.
The small improvement is further explained by the fact that naxolone, an antagonist drug that neutralizes opioid overdoses, has become much more widely available.
This is a way of seeing the glass half full. “A partial victory,” the experts noted. Because, based on the same data, the glass is also half empty, close to empty.
In another grim milestone, the balance of those twelve months indicates that the total number of deaths from this common poison amounted to an estimated 107,543 people. This represents a slight decrease compared to 2022, when 111,029 were registered, but at the same time it means that, for the third consecutive year, deaths are above 100,000 bodies, a mark that was assumed during the isolation and uncertainty of the covid.
This peak underlines the enormous scope of this scourge, a plague that began almost three decades ago with medical prescriptions, as if they were aspirin. Then, when official coverage dried up, the Mexican drug cartels saw a real business niche.
Beyond the statistics and the political confrontation generated by this issue, the stories of those who died of overdoses in 2023 outraged communities and distressed families across the American Atlas.
These stories include that of the one-year-old boy who accidentally died after ingesting fentanyl in a daycare center in New York, or that of the five members of the small tribe of the Lumbi, in Washington state, who breathed their last in the margin of a week, or the eight people who died in a matter of just a few days in a border county in Texas.
The data analysis presents light and dark points. While the number of deaths involving synthetic drugs, the field of fentanyl, fell by 3.7%, to remain at 74,700, which means that 7 out of every 10 fatal overdoses involve these substances, deaths from cocaine rose around 5%, and just over 2% those caused by methamphetamine.
The map indicates a geographical change. The fentanyl crisis had its origins on the East Coast, but last year’s records show a drop in that area, although there is an increase towards the west, especially in the states of Nevada, Washington, Alaska and Oregon, where legislators have had to backtrack in 2024 and annul the innovative policy of decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of hard drugs: fatal overdoses skyrocketed by 27%.
One of the complexities facing authorities is the invasion of the market with fake pills that look like drugs, but instead include lethal doses of fentanyl. Thus, last year the DEA (federal drug administration) recovered nearly 80 million of these fake pills that contained traces of fentanyl.
And a recent study in the Journal of Drug Policy indicated that police forces seized more than 115 million pills containing the laboratory-made opioid, compared to 49 million in 2017.
The dimension of the tragedy is illustrated with other elements. More than four in ten Americans (that’s more than 125 million Americans) know someone who has died from an overdose. And it is estimated that, as a result, up to 13% of the population (40 million) has seen its existence disrupted, highlighted a study recently published in the American Journal of Public Health.
This field work suggests that the epidemic has grown so deep because it was underestimated. In its history it has evolved from being a public health issue to a matter of political confrontation.
In New York, three young people died in one day. They were supplied by the same trafficker. These are the stories of fentanyl.
