Fentanyl was killing their friends – and no one was talking about it. So these teens stepped up

As fake pills send teen overdose deaths skyrocketing, these high schoolers are filling an information void with films and peer-to-peer education

Eli Myers was only 15 when his close friend and classmate Chloe Kreutzer died from taking a counterfeit Percocet pill filled with fentanyl.

Initially, he said, the response from officials at his Los Angeles high school was stony silence. Even years later, the information he and his classmates got about the risks of fentanyl poisoning amounted to little more than a droning lecture in health class, he said.

The same thing happened at Kyle Santoro’s northern California high school, when a student was found overdosing in a bathroom and was revived by the principal with Narcan.

‘They died because they tried it once’: a US high school was ravaged by fentanyl – and came back from the brink

“Our school never talked about it,” said Santoro, who said the student had just disappeared from campus and most students never even knew what happened.

Faced with an information void, Myers and Santoro took matters into their own hands. Today they’re part of a growing cadre of teens stepping up to educate their peers on the dangers of fentanyl, at a time when teen overdose deaths have skyrocketed to all-time highs, often caused by fake pills spiked with the super-potent synthetic opioid.

For both teens, film has been their medium of choice. In 2023, Santoro produced a feature length film, Fentanyl High, a somber documentary that interweaves the stories of parents who have lost kids to fentanyl, young people who have survived addiction and expert voices on how to combat the problem. Santoro, now 18, works with health officials to hold educational screenings and discussions around California.

Myers, also 18, led his classmates in turning an advanced video production class project into a film warning about the dangers of fentanyl that was shown at a school assembly this year.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/sep/16/teen-fentanyl-overdose-awareness-high-school