Ignorance of Fentanyl is Killing Our Kids
by Tracy Vonder Brink, Opinion contributor
A 19-year-old takes what she thinks is Xanax to help her anxiety. A college student who wants to study longer uses "Adderall." A young professional tries a party drug. All three found their drugs via social media or on the street, but none knew what they bought had been laced with fentanyl. All three died, poisoned by something they had no intention of taking.
Fentanyl is a lab-made opioid developed to treat severe pain. Like other opioids, it’s extremely effective − and extremely addictive. As the opioid crisis raged through the mid-1990s, people addicted to prescription opioids turned to the street. Drug traffickers were all too happy to oblige, quickly realizing that fentanyl is cheap and easy to produce. They added it to street drugs such as cocaine to hook people fast. Then, they used it in pills deliberately made to look like Adderall, Xanax and other prescription medications. Today, the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates 6 out of 10 fake prescription pills are laced with fentanyl.
What happens when a drug 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine is carelessly mass-produced by drug traffickers? People die. Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl, an amount small enough to fit on a pencil tip, can be enough to kill. Fentanyl has no taste or smell, so without testing, there’s no way to tell it’s been used as an additive. Fentanyl has become a leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-45.
Nobody who knew Jack Quehl would have imagined he’d be one of those statistics. Jack was a National Merit Scholar who placed in the top ten of his class at Moeller High School. He graduated from the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business and then came home to Loveland, Ohio, to wait out the pandemic with his family, working remotely at his first job at a startup. In August of 2021, he moved to Baltimore to begin his adult life. Barely a month later, Jack was dead.