Story of the Week #821: TUESDAY January 11, 2022: ‘DEADLY CONSEQUENCES : The Rise of Fentanyl’ from ZUMA Press photographer Roberto E. Rosales of the Albuquerque Journal: Esperanza Cordova isn’t afraid of the blues. Then again, the 43-year-old isn’t afraid of much. She’s been using heroin since she was 15 and, once fentanyl showed up, overdosed ”plenty of times” on a mix of the two. In the past year, she’s seen more than a dozen people overdose and die. Not strangers, people she cared about. Too many to count. The recent surge in drug US overdose deaths: 100,306 dead from April 2020 to April 2021, marks the first time the toll topped six figures in a 12-month period, according to provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Recent data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) points to one potential answer in illegally manufactured fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can be 50 times more potent than heroin. Fentanyl has changed the streets of Albuquerque, and swept across New Mexico in a perfect storm with authorities are seizing record amounts of the drug, while fighting a spike in the violent crime that has come along with it. Health officials meanwhile, count the rising dead from a record number of overdoses as the drug takes center stage in the opioid crisis. Welcome to ‘DEADLY CONSEQUENCES : The Rise of Fentanyl’
Scott Mc Kiernan, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, ZUMA Press
ZUMAland.com 