This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shimita Bassu. Today, the fentanyl crisis and how our government failed us. the call came in just after Fairfield County, a horrifying discovery.

The call came in just after 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon.

Neighbors at this downtown LA high rise are still in shock.

The two teenagers died just days apart.

Three women and two men were found dead inside the apartment building.

Seven overdoses in the last month.

This is an example of the dangerous drugs often laced with fentanyl.

Dead from an apparent fentanyl overdose.

Possible fentanyl overdose.

All five died from snorting cocaine that was laced with fentanyl.

Every seven minutes on average, somebody in America dies of a fentanyl overdose. Nearly 200 people are dying every day.

That's the equivalent of a

like a Boeing jet crashing and killing everybody on board every single day.

Scott Hyam is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post who has spent years covering the three distinctive

waves of the opioid epidemic, prescription pain pills, then heroin, and now fentanyl. He says more people are dying because of this cheap

synthetic drug that's 50 times more powerful than heroin. Last year you know 107

000 people died of drug overdoses,

and almost two-thirds of those were due to fentanyl.

Scott and his colleagues at the post

are out with an investigative series called Cartel RX.

It traces the rise of fentanyl, how it's produced and smuggled by drug cartels across the Mexican

border, and how this crisis didn't come out of nowhere.

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