The fentanyl overdose crisis is now one of the leading causes of death among adolescents,

and it's happening in every corner of the country.

Stay with us as we talk about the state of the crisis and the steps we can take to save lives.

I'm Dr. Josh Vader, the editor-in-chief of the Carlet Child Psychiatry Report and co-author of the Child

Medication Fact Book for Psychiatric Practice, Second Edition, 2023, and the other book, prescribing

psychotropics.

And I'm Mara Government, a licensed clinical social worker in Southern California with a private practice,

and an avid reader of the Carlet Psychiatry Reports. Today, we're addressing an urgent public

health issue affecting our youth. The fentanyl overdose crisis. The statistics are alarming. In the U.S., there are over 100,000

drug overdose deaths each year, with opioids accounting for a large portion of these cases.

Dr. Fader, could you provide an update on the current state of fentanyl overdoses among adolescents?

Mara, it's one of the largest public health crises we've ever seen.

Overdose deaths among teens have increased, get this more than 100% since the end of 2019.

Right now, opioid overdoses are the third leading cause of death in adolescence age 14 to 18,

right behind firearms and motor vehicle accidents.

At the very beginning of my career, Mara, I thought I was going to go into substance use.

You know, my career has been mostly trauma and autism, and I do a lot of that work.

But the reason was because even back then, we're talking about the early 90s, we had problems then, and it's so much worse now.

At that time, we were working with kids to try to help them role play, how to say,

you know, I don't want this stuff. It was in the age of just saying no.

If you remember this, there was millions of dollars poured into that program, and it turned out, it didn't

really work, because it was a message without a methodology that could be shown to actually

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