The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that more than 150 Americans die each day after using synthetic opioids, namely fentanyl. What makes it more disturbing is that many victims are young people who do not even know they are taking it.
A recent report from the Free Press detailed how kids and young adults are being poisoned by fake pills and powdered versions of other drugs that dealers have laced with fentanyl “to boost their profits.”
“These fake pills look identical to the real ones—Xanax, Adderall, Oxycontin, Percocet, and others,” the publication found. “You cannot see, smell, or taste fentanyl. Even [Drug Enforcement Agency] agents can’t tell the difference between what’s real and fake.”
The problem does not discriminate between race, gender, or socioeconomic status.
The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Google executive Dennis Troper was found dead of a suspected fentanyl overdose in his UC Berkeley.
Marco Troper’s body was found on February 13 after he consumed an unknown drug, USA Today reported. While the toxicology report has yet to be completed, his family warned the media about fentanyl.
“We don’t know what was in it,” his grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, told the Palo Alto Daily Post. “Teenagers and college students need to know that drugs today are not the same as the drugs of yesterday. They’re often laced with fentanyl.”
Approximately 22 kids die of a drug overdose each week in the U.S., with 80 percent of those deaths linked to fentanyl, the Free Press reports.
“Even with illicit drug use among middle and high school students on the decline, fatal teen overdoses have never been higher,” the publication revealed.
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The DEA “seized more than 77 million fentanyl pills” in 2023, the most in any single year to date. The agency believes that most are coming from drug cartels that produce the cheap drug for maximum profits, even if they kill their consumers.
“It costs the cartels as little as 10 cents to produce a fentanyl-laced fake prescription pill that is sold in the United States for as much as $10 to $30 per pill,” DEA administrator Anne Milgram told Congress in July 2023. “The cartels make billions of dollars from trafficking fentanyl into the United States.”
A new book by Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer reveals just how involved the Chinese government is in America’s fentanyl epidemic as well.
Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans, to be published Tuesday, documents how the Chinese Communist Party is using drugs, social chaos, and other means to tear apart the social fabric of the U.S.
Schweizer, a seven-time New York Times bestselling author whose past books have sparked FBI investigations and led to the resignation of members of Congress, is also president of the Government Accountability Institute.
A New York Post preview of the book by Schweizer goes into detail on how “most of the pharmaceutical ingredients needed to produce the synthetic cocktail known as fentanyl are produced in China.”
“The Chinese triads began forging relationships with the Mexican drug cartels and quickly became business partners with them,” the author wrote.