VIDEO – AMERICAN NIGHTMARE –

Feb. 18, 2022 – But about a year and a half ago, the middle schooler confessed to his parents about a very adult problem: He was experimenting with oxycodone, a prescription painkiller.

He had no idea that the pills he was taking were actually prescription knockoffs laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Just a few milligrams of fentanyl can be a fatal dose.

One morning in June 2020, his mother, Amy, found him dead in his bedroom. “I went to his room, and he was blue, just laying on his beanbag chair. Just like he had gone to bed, you know, just like he had fallen asleep there,” she said Though still rare, drug deaths among children ages 10 to 14 more than tripled from 2019 to 2020, according to an analysis done for CNN by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Unintentional drug overdoses led to 200,000 years of lost life for US preteens and teens who died between 2015 and 2019, a January study found. And experts suspect that the problem has gotten worse during the pandemic.

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