The Fentanyl Stories

Photo from a post on April 20, 2017 on the parent blog
of the Center on Addiction
https://drugfree.org/parent-blog/fentanyl-synthetic-opioids-5-things-need-know/

Heart-breaking doesn't begin to describe the fentanyl stories.

Tyler Skaggs was only 27 years old.  He used to hang around the softball field where my daughter Marie practiced at Santa Monica High School because his mother was the girls softball coach and he was five years younger than Marie.

Then he became a major league baseball player, and he battled injuries, for which he was prescribed oxycodone.  It only takes a week or two to become addicted to that drug if your body is susceptible.

Then on June 30 he flew to Texas with his team.  He drank enough alcohol that evening for his blood-alcohol level to reach 0.122% (.08% = a DUI). 

It was not a good idea to drink when 38 nanograms/mm of oxycodone was already in his system.

And then he ingested fentanyl--a choice only a very drunk person could make.

He hadn't even removed the cowboy boots he was wearing when he arrived in the hotel room.  His stomach fought back and vomited up its contents, but he choked on the vomit and died, found the next afternoon. 

My heart aches for his mother and for his bride.  He and she married last December.

"Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opiod similar to morphine but 50 to 100 times more potent on a weight-by-weight basis," write Maria Torres and Mike DiGiovanna in the Los Angeles Times, "Opiods found in Skaggs' system."  

How could anything be 100 times more powerful than morphine?  Who sold it to Tyler?

The only way this story could be any more tragic is to know that it happened to 30,000 people in the US last year.  

'No other drug in modern history has killed more people in a year," reports the Los Angeles Times with a two-page investigative report on fentanyl filling half the front page of today's Sunday edition.  Thank you to Kate Linthicum for reporting and writing "Death, made in Mexico."

Katie interviewed three drug suppliers in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico: an opium grower put out of business by the synthetic drugs, a 23-year-old fentanyl cook, and a 43-year-old trafficker of fentanyl who worries about the deaths in the US.

She also interviewed the family of Bryan McKinsey, who died last year at age 16 after ingesting fentanyl in a suburb of Phoenix.  His family's attention was focused on his older brother in rehab for use of the same drug.

My daughters too struggle with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and nicotine.  I have come close to getting the news that Bryan's and Tyler's parents received.

Thanks to rehab and AA along with CA, my daughter Ellen has 12 years clean and sober.  She's now a marriage and family therapist helping others face addictions.

But every story of a parent who has lost a child breaks my heart.