Fourteen-year-old Alondra Salinas had set out her new white sneakers and packed her backpack for her first day of in-person high school when police say she responded to an offer on Snapchat for blue pills that turned out to be deadly fentanyl. Her mother could not wake her the next morning. Seventeen-year-old Zachary Didier was waiting to hear back on his college applications when a fake Percocet killed him. Sammy Berman Chapman, a 16-year-old straight-A student, died in his bedroom after taking what he thought was a Xanax.
These tragedies are part of an explosion in drug-related deaths among US high school and college-aged youth. National statistics show a huge surge during the pandemic, with fatalities leaping to over 93,000 in 2020, a 32% rise from 2019. But no group has seen a faster increase than those under 24, among whom accidental drug deaths rose by 50% in a single year, taking 7,337 young lives in 2020. In California, a young person under 24 now dies every 12 hours from fentanyl, a 1,000% increase since 2018.
Fentanyl, a cheap synthetic opioid up to 100 times more potent than heroin, is being pressed into millions of pills that look exactly like traditional pharmaceuticals. The Drug Enforcement Administration seized nearly 10 million counterfeit pills in the first three quarters of 2021, more than the previous two years combined, and tests showed that two out of five contained enough fentanyl to kill.
Drug dealing has moved from street corners to social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram, enabling young people to buy what they think are Xanax, Percocet or Oxycodone from their bedrooms. 'These are not overdoses; these are poisonings,' said Shabbir Safdar, director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines. 'Nobody dies from taking a Xanax; nobody dies from taking a single Percocet. These are fake pills.' Author Sam Quinones, who tracks the fentanyl crisis, says the staggering quantities mean 'the days of recreational drug use are over'.
In San Diego county, fentanyl deaths rose from 92 in 2018 to a projected 810 in 2021, according to special agent Byrne of the US Department of Homeland Security. 'This stuff doesn't discriminate,' he said. 'We go and deal with a dead person who's homeless. Then we get another call and we're in a house that's worth $12m and that person's dead from the same drug.'
On 23 June 2020, it became personal for Byrne when his partner's 14-year-old nephew, Alexander Neville, was found unconscious in his bedroom in Orange county. His mother, Amy Neville, said she felt something was wrong as soon as she touched his door that morning: 'There was no energy there, it was like a weird feeling.' Alexander could not be revived.
