Makayla Cox, a high school student in Virginia, thought she was taking medication her friend bought to treat pain and anxiety.
Instead, two weeks after her sixteenth birthday, she took fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that was 50 times more potent than heroin. It killed her almost instantly.
After watching a movie — a Harry Potter prequel — with her mother Shannon one night in January, Makayla seemed fine as she walked into her bedroom with her husky dog, who often slept on her bed.
But when Shannon entered Makayla’s room the next morning, she found her partially upright, leaning against the headboard, and orange liquid spurting from her nose and mouth.
“She was stiff. I shook her, I yelled her name, I called 911,” Shannon told AFP. “My neighbors came over and did CPR, but it was too late. I don’t remember much after that.”
America’s opioid crisis has reached catastrophic proportions, with more than 80,000 people dying from opioid overdoses in the past year, most of them from illegal synthetic substances like fentanyl — more than seven times the number a decade ago.
“This is the deadliest epidemic we’ve ever seen,” said Ray Donovan, chief of operations for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). “Fentanyl isn’t like any other illegal narcotic, it’s so deadly instantly.”
And deaths are rising particularly fast among young people who source counterfeit prescription drugs through social media. They are unaware that the pills are either laced with or made from fentanyl.
In 2019, 493 American youth died from a drug overdose, up from 1,146 in 2021.
– Dealers seek youth through apps –
Drug dealers reach out to teens on apps like Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and others, often using emoji as code.
Oxycodone, an opioid, can be advertised as a half-peeled banana, Xanax, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety, as a candy bar, and Adderall, an amphetamine that acts as a stimulant, as a toke.
Wilson Compton, associate director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said the number of Americans using drugs has remained largely the same in recent years, but what has changed is how deadly they have become.
A cup of heroin is equivalent to a teaspoon of fentanyl, and less than a gram can mean the difference between life and death.
“It takes very small amounts to be a poison that can make someone breathe,” Compton said in an interview with AFP.
Most of the illicit fentanyl in the United States is made by Mexican drug cartels in secret laboratories from chemicals shipped from China.
Because fentanyl is much more potent, far less of it is needed to fill a pill, resulting in more supply and more profit for the cartels.
A kilogram of pure fentanyl can be bought for as much as $12,000 and compressed into half a million pills that sell for as much as $30 each and fetch millions of dollars, Donovan said. And it’s also much easier to smuggle in pill form.
Last year, the DEA seized 15,000 pounds (nearly seven tons) of fentanyl — enough to kill every American. Four out of ten pills seized contain lethal levels of fentanyl.
– “A pill can kill” –
A photo collection entitled “Faces of Fentanyl” hangs in the hallway of the agency’s headquarters. It contains dozens of portraits of people who have recently lost their lives to fentanyl. One reads “Makayla. Forever 16”.
Makayla, an honor student and cheerleader, enjoyed painting, snuggling with her two huskies, Maize and Malenkai, and was planning to go to university to study law, said her mother Shannon Doyle, 41, who works as a paralegal on a loan services firm.
Makayla had struggled with anxiety after her parents’ divorce, but things got worse during the pandemic.
Last summer, she started a job at a water park where she met a friend who introduced her to fake prescription drugs.
The blue pills found in Makayla’s bed were 100 percent fentanyl. Police are investigating, but no arrests have been made so far.
“Back in the day, when you were addicted to drugs, you had five, 10, 15 years to try to beat your addiction, get help, and make a change in your life,” Shannon said at her home in Virginia Beach, a town on the Atlantic coast around 400 kilometers south of the US capital.
“You don’t have that chance anymore.”
Last year the DEA launched a campaign called “A Pill Can Kill” to raise awareness of the dangers of fentanyl, and there are efforts across America to promote naloxone, a drug that can reverse an opioid overdose, more readily available, including in schools.
Makayla’s ashes are in her bedroom, and Shannon still looks into the room every morning and evening, just as she did when her daughter was alive.
She set up a foundation in Makayla’s name to help prevent similar tragedies — a way she says is helping her cope with her grief.
Makayla’s best friend Kaydence Blanchard, 16, is spending the summer without her trying to fulfill the girls’ dreams: get a driver’s license and go to the beach.
But for Makayla, “the future will never happen,” Blanchard said. “She will never go through with any of the plans we had together.”
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