The general consensus of today’s youth is that those D.A.R.E. programs we had to sit through in school as kids were pretty useless. If anything, they taught us what pot looked and smelled like so when we went home we could tell if our parents enjoyed lighting up after bedtime, and while wearing D.A.R.E. shirts to music festivals has become a sort of inside joke, there’s one thing the program did get right:
Drugs kill.
Well, some drugs kill. Fentanyl definitely kills. Don’t do fentanyl.
What is fentanyl, you ask? According to the DEA it’s “a powerful synthetic drug that can be deadly.” Fun! If you’ve been paying attention to recent drug trends, you’ll know that fentanyl’s been around for a bit…but now that it’s being mixed with heroin in order to increase its potency (unbeknownst to heroin users), people are starting to die:
This week, 10 drug users died from overdoses in 12 days in the Sacramento area – many due to unknowingly taking tablets containing fentanyl.
Jerome Butler died after taking what he thought was an opiate painkiller.
His mother, Natasha, said, ‘It shut down his organs. It shut down his kidneys. It shut down his liver. His brain was swollen. The doctor said he said there was nothing he could do for him. From one pill.’
…The drug – prescribed to cancer patients for severe pain – is highly potent, and can cause fatal overdoses even in hardened drug users.
…‘The vast majority of IMF is being mixed with heroin to increase its potency and sold as heroin. State level and national data indicate that persons dying from fentanyl are predominately heroin users and are being exposed to fentanyl by its presence in heroin that is cut with fentanyl—most often without the heroin user being aware.’(via)
Now, this is really only a problem for heroin users – do you use heroin? No? Then you’re definitely safe from fentanyl.
But if you DO use heroin…well, it’s not like your lifespan was really that long in the first place anyway.
[H/T Metro]