Opinion: Parents, here are tips to save your teens from fentanyl

Editor’s Note: Dr. Scott Hadland is a pediatrician and expert on adolescent substance use. He is the chief of adolescent medicine at MassGeneral Hospital for Children and Harvard Medical School. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

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Pediatricians like me aren’t used to our patients dying. Most children and teens are healthy and thrive, and although some might experiment with drugs, teen overdoses are relatively uncommon. A rising threat, however, is forcing all of us – especially parents – to grapple with a new reality.

Just-released data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that in 2021 more teens than ever before died of overdoses, driven by increasingly potent and dangerous drugs. Overdoses are now the third leading cause of death in US children under age 20, killing more than 1,100 teens each year – the equivalent of a school classroom every week.

Here’s what parents need to know about drug overdoses and how to prevent them.

The new CDC data paints a grim picture of how teens are overdosing. Opioids cause nine out of 10 teen deaths, and fentanyl is the most common opioid involved. In many cases, teens are dying from counterfeit prescription pills that contain fentanyl, an opioid 50 times more potent than heroin.

These fake pills are made to look like real opioid painkillers such as Percocet or OxyContin, anti-anxiety medications like Xanax or other prescription tablets. But, instead, these phony versions contain fentanyl because it is sedating, eliciting a similar effect to the real pills they mimic.

Counterfeit pills are everywhere in America. The Drug Enforcement Administration recently announced that its seizures of fake pills doubled from 2021 to 2022. When a teen buys a pill from a friend or dealer, it is now more likely than not that it will be a counterfeit and contain a lethal amount of fentanyl. Counterfeit pills now cause at least one out of every four teen overdose deaths, though this is likely an underestimate because pills found at death scenes are rarely tested.

As a pediatrician, I’ve seen that teens turn to pills for a range of reasons. Some try pills because they’re experimenting. However, despite an…