Awareness of adolescent overdose deaths is crucial to save young lives. Despite a decline in drug use among teens, overdose deaths have more than doubled due to the millions of counterfeit pills laced with lethal doses of fentanyl. Parents, teachers, and communities must work together to educate and protect youth from the dangers of illicit drugs and ensure safe prescription practices.

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The news of the opioid crisis may not be dominating the headlines these days. But the problem has not gone away.  It has not lessened. It is getting worse.

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Despite a decline in overall drug use among teenagers, fatal drug overdoses among teens have spiked. Why has this happened? Drug trafficking organizations first discovered how easy it was to manufacture illicit fentanyl and then learned to press it into tens of millions of pills for the American market.

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Fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid that is similar to morphine but is anywhere from 50–100 times more potent, has become the leading cause of drug overdose fatalities in the United States. Its widespread use is extremely grim because even as some people who struggle with addiction try to avoid the drug, dealers increasingly add fentanyl to their drug supplies to make each batch more potent, addictive, and dangerous.

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The 2022 Monitoring the Future Survey was finalized and published recently. The findings showed no progress in reducing teen substance abuse rates from 2021 to 2022, as rates of substance abuse among young people held steady compared to drug use rates in previous years.

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California recently conducted a statewide crackdown on fentanyl, seizing over 28,000 pounds of the highly potent opioid in the past year, a nearly six-fold increase over the previous year. Given the exponential increase in the prevalence of fentanyl in the United States, family members of addicts must be warned of the dangers of fentanyl and encouraged to seek help for their loved ones as soon as possible.

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One of the most significant risks of using drugs is the possibility that an addict will unknowingly use a completely different drug from what they were expecting. This risk has been particularly evident with the recent surge in fatal fentanyl overdoses.

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For much of the 2010s, fentanyl addiction and overdoses surged in regional areas like the Northeast, Appalachia, and the Southeast. At the time, many experts believed fentanyl addiction and overdose would remain a localized crisis, not a national one. Unfortunately, recent reporting has indicated that the scope of fentanyl addiction and overdose has largely broadened, with the Midwest, Southwest, West Coast, and Pacific Northwest now being ravaged by fentanyl addiction and overdose deaths.

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Since the turn of the century, drug overdose fatalities have surged across America. While several different types of drugs have contributed to the crisis, opioids (especially fentanyl) have caused most of the deaths. How does one drug contribute to so much death across the country?

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Every year, the Drug Enforcement Administration reports on the biggest drug threats in our country because those threats never stay the same two years in a row. These annual reports can arm parents with enough information to warn their children of the intense, life-threatening risks of drug use.

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