The drug crisis stemming from the flood of illegal drugs over the U.S.-Mexico border has reached America’s middle and high schools thousands of miles from the border.
Earlier this month, a 16-year-old at Bloomfield High School in Bloomfield, Connecticut, nearly died due to a fentanyl overdose after smoking marijuana he didn’t know had been laced with the deadly drug. As Real Clear Politics reported, “Police rushed to the school nurse’s office and administered two doses of Narcan just in time to save him.”
At the time, Gov. Ned Lamont (D-CT) asked “How did this happen? How is there more fentanyl on the streets than ever before?”
RCP noted that Hidalgo County, Texas, Sheriff J.E. Guerra explained that “The drugs go further north.”
The Daily Wire reported in January that a 13-year-old in Connecticut also died of a fentanyl overdose after spending days in the hospital. From The Daily Wire:
Police investigators searched the school and found 40 small bags of a substance in two classrooms, as well as the school gymnasium. The substance was later identified as fentanyl in powder form, a police spokesman told NBC Connecticut. Police said they believe the fentanyl was brought in by a student.
Newsweek reported that the student fell unconscious and collapsed in the gymnasium Thursday morning. The school nurse administered CPR to the student before Hartford Fire Department personnel arrived on the scene and took over. The school was locked down while DEA agents and State and local police searched the premises, then the students were dismissed, but not before they were required to decontaminate their shoes in case of exposure. Hartford Public Schools Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez told NBC Connecticut that the school is currently being cleaned, she added, and “dust wipe sampling” is being conducted.
The two students who reportedly came in contact with the substance were briefly hospitalized, but have since been released and are at home, the NBC reported. None of the three teens have been named.
As RCP noted, not all overdose victims are addicts.
“Fentanyl is 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine. When teens experiment with fentanyl-laced drugs, they’re not just risking addiction; they’re risking death on the first try. No second chance. Fentanyl kills so fast that by the time first responders arrive, more often than not, there’s no pulse,” the outlet reported. “Many teen victims ‘probably don’t have a substance use disorder, they’re experimenting, making a bad choice, and they end up dead,’ explains Roneet Lev, an emergency room physician in San Diego.”
The Daily Wire reported in December that deaths from fentanyl have nearly doubled since 2019, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showing that “the powerful opioid is now the leading killer of American adults ages 18-45, causing more deaths than suicide, COVID-19, and car accidents.”
“Between 2020 and 2021, nearly 79,000 people between 18 and 45 years old — 37,208 in 2020 and 41,587 in 2021 — died of fentanyl overdoses, the data analysis from opioid awareness organization Families Against Fentanyl shows,” Fox News reported at the time.
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Source: Dailywire
