Kansas family loses 16-year-old as DEA warns about pills laced with fentanyl

SHAWNEE, Kan. (WDAF) — An alarming enhance in overdoses from counterfeit capsules laced with fentanyl prompted the Drug Enforcement Administration to difficulty its 1st public safety announcement in six several years.

It claims one tablet can eliminate and under no circumstances choose any medicines that do not arrive from a reliable pharmacy.

A Shawnee relatives is a single of pretty much 100,000 people struggling this calendar year from what the DEA calls an epidemic.

Sixteen-12 months-old Cooper Davis was an adventurous kid who required to go the fastest, leap the highest and had an attraction to dangerous athletics. He was somebody who never ever understood a stranger, lit up every place he walked into, did silly items just to be funny and was the life of the social gathering. He was also a leisure drug person.

“We experimented with to convince him that he would not often know what he was getting provided, that there was just also many unknowns out there and what he was accomplishing was unsafe.” explained Cooper’s mom Libby Davis. “But Cooper normally experienced the mentality of it will under no circumstances transpire to me. He always imagined he was invincible in all the threat-using items he would do.”

August 29, Libby Davis got a mobile phone simply call she feared. Her son was at a friend’s home and was obtaining a health-related crisis. When she arrived, unexpected emergency crews have been making an attempt to help you save his everyday living.

“We experienced to check out him get wheeled out of that household with the device violently pumping his upper body,” Davis explained by means of her tears. “It’s a sight that we really don’t want any other parents to have to see.”

As really hard as they experimented with, medical practitioners could not help save Cooper and his mom reported her last text to her son before he slipped away.

“We said we loved him,” Davis stated. “No matter how hard it could be often, you know, when he wasn’t generating the selection that we wanted him to make, we normally loved him.”

Just before he died, Cooper sent a picture to a pal of a baggie holding two drugs that he thought to be Percocet. One particular was most probably laced with a lethal dose of fentanyl. Cooper took one and died. His buddy took the other and survived.

“The suggestion of a pencil, that smaller sum is the sum of fentanyl that can kill you, that’s in these products. So it’s like a milligram sum,” reported DEA Assistant Special Agent in Demand of Kansas Rogeana Patterson-King. “One pill can eliminate and your existence is too vital to enjoy Russian roulette with it.”

Past 12 months, 93,000 people died of these kinds of overdoses, which is a 30{09b62f9dd9f8bee9bd113be20c25b351a1085088105ac6c5ddb6e1732d50b4e0} increase. So much this calendar year, the DEA has seized far more than 9.6 million fatal counterfeit tablets, which is a lot more than the prior two years combined. Two out of five bogus tablets coming into the country are laced with fatal doses of fentanyl.

Patterson-King likens the manufacturing procedure to generating a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

“You place like, a bunch of your chocolate chips into your batter and when you prepare dinner them you imagine it’s all like blended up evenly, but you may perhaps get a single that has three chocolate chips and just one of them has 10,” she explained. “That’s the very same way they are undertaking in these labs when they’re generating these counterfeit supplements there.”

Counterfeit products are uncomplicated to get. Davis thinks her son acquired his prescription drugs from anyone on Snapchat, a social media platform also named by the DEA as a issue.

“They know what’s occurring and I really don’t really feel like they’re accomplishing sufficient to not enable their application to be the avenue to distribute medicines,” Davis claimed.

A spokesperson for Snap, Inc, the corporation that owns and operated Snapchat explained in a assertion:

“As the devastating fentanyl epidemic continues, we are fully commited to doing anything we can to struggle it on Snapchat. We strictly prohibit drug-similar action on our platform, aggressively implement versus these violations, and guidance legislation enforcement in their investigations. We are concentrated on the two boosting awareness of the potential risks of fentanyl with younger folks directly in our app and appreciably strengthening our operational do the job to beat drug dealers on our platform. In modern months, we have continued to strengthen our device discovering equipment for proactively detecting drug-connected exercise, and get the job done with the DEA and other third-party gurus to preserve these efforts up-to-date as behaviors evolve. We have an significant information for drug sellers: you are not welcome on Snapchat. If we detect drug seller action, we will delete your account and may perhaps also offer it to law enforcement.” 

The tablet that killed Cooper Davis also broke the hearts of so many persons who knew and beloved him. His mother is locating some power and therapeutic in sharing his tale.

“Because we require anything fantastic to materialize, we want to use Cooper’s tale to save lives.”

The DEA has established up a web site exactly where people can go for methods.