Overdose kills more and more teenagers in 'epidemic' with 100,000 victims a year in the US

Teen deaths from fentanyl overdoses are up 20% in the past year. Who is to blame and what can be done to improve this situation? Teen overdose deaths have never been higher in the US. Young Americans are increasingly affected by fentanyl, an opioid drug. More than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses last year — the vast majority of them adults. But the group that showed the greatest growth in the death rate for this reason was precisely that of adolescents. Melanie Ramos' family is well aware of this. The 15-year-old girl died in her school's bathroom last month after taking a pill that contained fentanyl. Ramos and a friend thought they were taking oxycodone and acetaminophen. But the counterfeit pills were mixed with fentanyl — and she ended up intoxicated.

"She was a beautiful, sweet girl with hardworking parents," her uncle Oscar recounted during a candlelit vigil on the steps of Bernstein High School, where friends and family prayed in Spanish and laid flowers at a shrine created for branches. Fentanyl is commonly smuggled into the United States by Mexican drug cartels. While it used to be mixed with harder drugs like heroin, cartels now mass-produce rainbow-colored fentanyl pills to mimic regular pills and, according to experts, to target children who are more willing to try them. . In Los Angeles, a series of overdose deaths has authorities worried. On Wednesday, the State of California seized 24 kilograms of fentanyl powder — enough to make 250,000 pills — as part of an operation led by the Department of Justice. But the problem extends across the US. In New York last week, authorities seized 15,000 colored pills hidden in a box of Lego toys. The United States is an exception when it comes to overdoses, with a death rate 20 times the global average.

The Ramos school, like other Los Angeles institutions, will stock up on doses of Narcan, an overdose reversal drug — Photo: BBC At a meeting at Bernstein High School where Ramos died, officials and police warned families and children about "the pill that can kill". By João Panoni ; Facebook and Instagram