My son Jonah died at age 25 after being poisoned by fentanyl. He had just landed his dream job as a production assistant in Atlanta for TNT Sports. His career, his love life, his future — everything — was taken from him in an instant.
In the aftermath of his death, and while producing a television program on the dangers of fentanyl to honor him, I learned a lot about this lethal drug that I didn’t know before. One of the most shocking things was that kids and young adults are unknowingly being exposed to fentanyl in alarming numbers — and many are dying as a result. Seventy thousand people die from fentanyl overdoses in the United States every year, making it a leading cause of death for people ages 55 and under.
Credit: Heidi Gutman
Credit: Heidi Gutman
Curbing the supply of fentanyl from Mexico is one of President-elect Donald Trump’s stated priorities for his second term. He is demanding that Mexico crack down on the cartels supplying fentanyl to the American heartland, where it has had a devastating impact since roughly 2015, and he’s promised to impose massive tariffs on goods from the country to achieve that aim. Clearly, the less fentanyl reaching the United States from Mexico the better. But there is an achievable path out of this crisis that doesn’t focus solely on geopolitics and targeting supply. We must put more of our energy into the other end of the equation: demand. With less demand, the market will shrink, and fewer people will die.
How do we encourage choice — the choice to avoid a deadly drug — when so many people unintentionally ingest fentanyl? That requires getting the facts about fentanyl into the heads of people who do not recognize how it alone has increased the risk of death by drugs by orders of magnitude.
I was one of those people before Jonah died. I did not know that dealers were cutting fentanyl into drugs such as cocaine without the knowledge of their customers. I did not know that an amount of fentanyl equal to a few grains of sand is enough to kill you. I did not know that the market is flooded with fake versions of well-known prescription pills such as Xanax, Percocet and Adderall that are as much as 70% pure fentanyl. I just did not know.
Fentanyl, which has legitimate use as an anesthetic in strictly controlled medical settings, is far different from traditional recreational drugs, such as marijuana and cocaine. That’s because it is a synthetic opioid, which makes it easier and cheaper to produce than an opioid derived from plants — and more profitable for the cartels pumping it into the drug supply. It is also more potent. “What we’re seeing today is the single largest transformation in the drug trade ever,” Jim Crotty, a former deputy chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Agency, said in my program. “Drugs are nothing new. … What’s different today is how lethal they are.”
That means a different kind of message is needed. The “Just Say No” campaign of the 1980s failed because its patronizing tone implied that those who abstained from drugs were morally superior to those who took part recreationally or regularly. Its warnings that so-called “gateway drugs” like marijuana and cocaine would inevitably lead to catastrophe turned out to be exaggerated and mostly false. And yet, despite the flawed messaging of “Just Say No,” back in the 1980s, a single line of cocaine or one pill didn’t carry a potential death sentence, as it does now.
With fentanyl, the alarm is real. This catastrophe is continuing to unfold. And that calls for a stark warning: The drugs you buy from dealers today have a high risk of being contaminated with fentanyl, and, if they are, they will kill you. This might sound like yet one more case being made for abstinence, but this is not an appeal to morality. This is an argument based on reason and the instinct for self-preservation.
Given that 22 American teenagers die from drug overdoses each week, with fentanyl involved 75% of the time, schools should be a priority venue for delivering the warning message. Good educational programs are struggling to get a foothold, however, either because local education leaders still don’t understand the risks or are shying away from an issue that continues to carry enormous stigma. We must change this.
Exceptions do exist. After the fentanyl-induced deaths of four students in Beaverton, Oregon, in 2021, the school district worked with a parent-led organization, “Song for Charlie,” founded to raise awareness of these dangers for families, teens, and young adults — to create a classroom program appropriate for children. It relies on the facts and does not sugarcoat them. Jennifer Hicks, the teacher who leads the program, explained, “I need them to understand you cannot trust a random pill. This is life or death. There’s no experimenting with these substances.” There have been no deaths from fentanyl in the Beaverton district since the program began.
Of course, there will still be some kids who don’t heed the warnings or might be unaware of the danger and end up overdosing. At that point, it may fall to the people with them — their friends and classmates — to save them. Education must therefore include instruction on how to recognize an overdose, why it is critical to call 911 and how to administer the drug naloxone, which immediately reverses the deadly effects of fentanyl.
Each day, when I think about my Jonah, I think about the many ways he might still be here if only he had understood the risks he took during a single night out with friends. If only I had known more about fentanyl and could have warned him about it. If only the friends he was with had recognized what had happened to him and called for help or administered help themselves.
None of that happened, and my Jonah is gone. But it’s not too late to create a world where the warnings about fentanyl are so widely heard and understood that nobody would want to touch a “random pill” from a drug dealer. It’s not too late to educate each other on the signs of an overdose, how to deliver help directly and when to call for help. I still believe this is all a possibility. But first, we need to talk about the danger. We need to teach about it. And while others work on the supply, we need to turn off the demand.
Caren Zucker is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. She served as co-host and an executive producer of “To Save a Life: A National Fentanyl Alarm,” which aired on Scripps News.
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