ELK GROVE, Calif. — Hundreds of high school students learned about the dangers of Fentanyl at Pleasant Grove High in Elk Grove Monday.
Law enforcement experts said the deadly drug is being found in prescription pills sold to teens on social media and has even been discovered in vaping and marijuana products.
Julie Rushing lost her son to Fentanyl poisoning in June. He graduated from Pleasant Grove High in 2010, with dreams of a career in computer science.
“That’s my son and I miss him every day,” Rushing said. “My world, my son, my best friend… that’s what they took.”
He thought he had purchased Percocet but what he had taken turned out to be something much stronger.
“They’re being produced to look like something else, but all that’s in there is Fentanyl,” Jonathan Charron, criminalist with the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office Laboratory of Forensic Services, said.
Charron said Aiden’s story is becoming far too common, especially among those in their teens and 20s, where they think they are buying prescription pills like Xanax or Adderall from someone online and lose their life.
The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office said people die from Fentanyl overdoses at identical rates to homicides in Sacramento County. 92% of Oxycodone pills their crime lab tests are counterfeit and 75% are pure Fentanyl.
“It’s much more dangerous now because we’re not just seeing Fentanyl show up in tablets, but we’re seeing it show up in other drug classes,” Charron said. “We’re seeing it in meth, we’re seeing it mixed with heroine, some types of cocaine, some marijuana-type products, so experimentation now is a different game. It’s a difference scene as far as drug-use goes."
Now, families in mourning hope to shield others from the pain of burying a child by holding education seminars throughout the greater Sacramento area.
“I want people to know that it can happen to anyone and that it’s in anything,” Rushing said. “What you think you’re getting is not what you’re getting.”
Rushing hopes to warn people like her son before it’s too late.
“I have been robbed of a world of my son and the futures that we had talked about,” she said. “Now, I have to go on every day missing him and wondering what now my future is going to be like.”
Fentanyl is 100-times stronger than Morphine and only takes two milligrams to kill. More than 150 people died from Fentanyl overdoses every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
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