Michelle is a 37-year-old woman, a patient at our Mental Health Clinic. She is also known for being a Yale undergraduate, recently admitted to Law School. She lives with her parents in a brownstone in Cobble Hills , Brooklyn. Her mother is a retired high school teacher, I met her in family sessions a few times. She has shared with us her dream of seeing her married with children, after becoming a successful lawyer.
“My daughter has always been special , standing out among her peers, accepted from a young age into the best school programs in the city“.
Michelle carries the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder and Opioid Use Disorder. Many hospitalizations, detox, rehab admissions followed by as many relapses, while still functioning on administrative jobs and passing the LSATS to enter Law School. Nobody in her circles knows that she buys drugs in the street, nobody suspects that such a well-spoken, cultivated woman might be opioid dependent. Till we receive the call we have been afraid of all along, the one that shatters her mother’s dreams forever.
Michelle is not waking up, she is not breathing, she is found dead in her bed. Michelle is one of the 111,000 deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses in 12 months in 2023, up a few thousand every year since 2019 .
Fentanyl. This has become a household name since the media have reported in several “Specials” (CNN, 2023, among others) the tragic outcome of Fentanyl use, alerting the public, especially young people using seemingly “innocuous” recreational drugs, such as cannabis, that Fentanyl powder can be surreptitiously added to anything they are buying on the street. Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine and ….. it’s much cheaper than any other drug, lending itself to the criminal use as an additive to any substance: pot, ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, in powder form, in pill form.
“One pill can kill”. It could be your first time. It depresses your respiratory system like a powerful anesthetic, you stop breathing, you don’t wake up.
The precursor of Fentanyl is produced in labs in China, makes its way to Mexico – where it’s manufactured by the cartels into Fentanyl – and from there it crosses the border into the US.
The opioid crisis has risen to the level of public health emergency and international politics issue. In November 2023, President Biden discussed it his first in person meeting with President Xi Jinpin, who pledged his cooperation in stopping this lethal cycle. The theme was reprised in a phone call between the two leaders last week. To underscore that this is top of mind for the administration, on March 15th, Secretary of State Blinken issued an urgent call to curb synthetic opioid trafficking at a session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs – a forum where the U.S. has not typically been active .
We can only hope that political interventions at the highest level can decrease in 2024 the frightening statistics of 2023.
