How Fentanyl Is Becoming Tennessee’s Killer Drug

Fentanyl has quickly surged to become a leading killer drug in Tennessee, spiking 70 percent between 2016 and 2017. That’s according to new overdose statistics put out by the Health Department this week.

Public health officials are redoubling their warnings.

“You can’t know what you’re getting when you buy drugs on the street, and that makes them extremely dangerous,” Tennessee’s chief medical officer David Reagan said 
in a statement. “We are alarmed by the growing number of Tennesseans dying from drug overdoses, especially involving fentanyl. We must place additional focus on prevention of substance abuse.”

There are those who seek out fentanyl because it’s so potent. But they know to be careful. This manmade drug is stronger than heroin and
50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. Yet it’s cheap to produce — often in
clandestine overseas labs.

Where drug users often get in trouble is when dealers take fentanyl and put it in
a counterfeit pill or combine it with some diluted heroin, and in effect “cut” the street drug. The dosage becomes anybody’s guess, and the lack of precision often has widespread consequences, like
in a Connecticut park last week, where 70 people overdosed.

Nona Fox of Pegram says her son, Cole, had been in outpatient drug treatment. In March 2018, he died with a non-lethal amount of heroin in his body. The autopsy revealed a lethal dose of fentanyl.

“We will never know what led to him relapsing,” she says, “but he was working in downtown Nashville at the time, and he bought heroin.

“And it obviously contained fentanyl.”

Fox says she’d even talked to her son just a few weeks before about avoiding fentanyl, after seeing public health warnings across the state. The 23-year-old was worried about stepping down off Suboxone but assured her that even if he did go back to using, he would never buy from anyone but his trusted dealer.

Whatever happened, he became one of the 500 Tennesseans to die last year from a fentanyl overdose. His mother calls it a poisoning.

Correction: Cole Fox died in 2018, not 2017 as the original post stated incorrectly