The opioid epidemic is a crisis that has been ravaging the United States for years and the situation is only getting worse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of overdose deaths among adolescents aged 15 to 19 has doubled between 2018 and 2021, with fentanyl being the main cause. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association determined that the rate of deaths from black-market fentanyl and related synthetics has increased more than twenty-fold since 2010. Benzodiazepines, a class of depressants, ranked as the second leading cause of death in this age group and claimed 152 lives in 2021. *
The potency of fentanyl, its low cost and ease of production and its prevalence in counterfeit pills often means that teens do not even realize they are taking it. This has led to the reversal of a decades-long trend of decreasing mortality among the young, with death rates in this age group rising by almost 20 percent between 2019 and 2021. *
In contrast to the increasing number of overdoses, drug and alcohol use among teenagers is actually decreasing. Over the past two decades, the share of 12th grade students using illicit drugs has dropped from 21 percent to 8 percent, the share of 12th grade students drinking alcohol has plummeted from 72 percent to 52 percent and cigarette smoking has dropped from 57 percent to 17 percent. Even the rate of teens deaths from prescription opioid overdose has dropped from 38 in 2010 to 66 in 2021. *
Successful anti-drug campaigns have not been enough to counteract the dangerous proliferation of fentanyl and other opioids. Public health advocates are hoping that the growing death toll of overdose deaths will inspire parents and educators to make teens more aware of the risks of these drugs. In order to truly combat the opioid epidemic, both the United States and Mexico must work together to tackle the impunity that traffickers enjoy and to limit the flow of guns and ingredient chemicals from China.