Shocking number of 8th graders don’t think fentanyl is dangerous — even though it’s a leading cause of death

A shocking number of American 8th graders don’t think fentanyl poses a great risk to their health — despite the dangerous drug being the third leading cause of child deaths.

Just 48% of 13 and 14-year-olds said taking the drug one or two times posed a great risk to their health in a July survey published in JAMA Network Open.

That means more than half of students polled didn’t answer a clean “Yes” when asked whether the drug was dangerous to their health, StudyFinds reported.

Only 47.8% of American 8th graders called taking fentanyl once or twice a great risk to their health in a new study. StudyFinds

Instead, some called fentanyl merely a slight or moderate risk — while more than 16% didn’t even know what fentanyl was.

That’s despite the drug being behind 75% of adolescent deaths — a number which equated to 21 deaths per week in 2023, or about one typical high school class fatally overdosing.

In New York, overall opiate deaths dropped slightly in 2023, the most recent available year — but still claimed 5,300 lives. Fentanyl was involved in 93% of those deaths.

Fentanyl — an extremely powerful synthetic opioid — is frequently cut into illegal drugs by dealers to make the drugs more potent, allowing them to sell less product for the same prices.

But the trick is typically pulled without buyer knowledge, meaning users might not know what they’re putting in their body. And, since fentanyl is so potent, even the smallest amounts of the drug can cause fatal overdoses.

Compounding the matter is the shadowy nature of the illicit drug world — since little is typically known about where drugs come from, even a dealer who isn’t cutting drugs with fentanyl can wind up with contaminated products which their clients then overdose on, according to JAMA.

And the dangerous drug doesn’t just claim the lives of people buying drugs off the street — the rich and famous have been killed by unwittingly ingesting fentanyl-laced drugs, including singer Mac Miller and actor Robert De Niro’s grandson Leandro.

Fentanyl is the third leading cause of fatal overdoses among teens in the United States — yet many don’t know what it is. Darwin Brandis – stock.adobe.com

The JAMA Network study polled 3,820 students from the 8th, 10th and 12th grades, who were asked whether using fentanyl once, twice, occasionally or regularly posed “No risk,” a “Great risk” or that they “Don’t know what that is,” according to StudyFinds.

Students did appear to wise up some as they aged — with 64% of 10th graders, saying fentanyl use once or twice posed a great risk and 69% of 12th graders saying so.

Those who didn’t know what the drug was also declined, with 8.9% of 10th graders saying they were unfamiliar with the drug and 9.9% of seniors saying so.

Students polled were drawn from various demographics, with the study finding white students were the most likely to view fentanyl as dangerous. Hispanic and black students were the most likely to say they’d never heard of the drug.

Kids from urban backgrounds were also less likely to see fentanyl as dangerous than those from rural communities.

And students with college-educated parents were over twice as likely — 14.7% to 6.1% — to say they didn’t know what the drug was than kids without college-educated parents.