Teen overdose deaths have never been higher in the U.S. as young people are increasingly poisoned by the synthetic opiate fentanyl, even as fewer teens use drugs.
More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year — the vast majority were adults — but the fastest growing group to die of overdoses was teenagers, the BBC reports.
Fentanyl is typically smuggled into the United States by Mexican drug cartels. While it used to be laced into the hardest drugs like heroin, the cartels now mass-produce fentanyl pills in rainbow colours to mimic prescription pills and, some say, to target kids who are more willing to experiment with them.
In Los Angeles, a spate of overdose deaths from pills has authorities worried, and on Wednesday, the state of California seized 24kg of fentanyl powder — enough to make a quarter-million pills — as part of a state-wide operation led by the Justice department.
But the problem extends across the U.S. In New York last week, authorities seized 15,000 rainbow coloured pills hidden in a Lego toy box.
The U.S. is an outlier when it comes to overdoses, with a death rate 20 times the global average — although Scotland is not far behind.
“We are far and away the world leader in overdose death unfortunately,” said Joseph Friedman, a substance use researcher at the University of California Los Angeles.
The overdose rate among school-aged children in the U.S. doubled from 2019 to 2020, and rose 20% last year, he said.
