(Updated 11/02/22 at 9:20 a.m.) “Do you know how it feels to look at your daughter when she can’t move her eyes?”
That’s an Arlington mother, who spoke to ARLnow on the condition of anonymity, about a recent fentanyl overdose her 13-year-old daughter survived. It happened off school grounds, but the mother believes her daughter took the drugs during school hours.
Parents and school community leaders who have spoken with ARLnow say that students in middle and high school are able to access counterfeit prescription oxycodone laced with fentanyl at or near schools.
The mother who spoke to ARLnow said her daughter started vaping nicotine and marijuana in middle school, and by the end of eighth grade, got a hold of counterfeit Percocet — a mixture of oxycodone and acetaminophen — cut with fentanyl.
“The only thing I want is for the parents to know that kids can get every kind of drug inside the schools,” she said through a Spanish-language interpreter. “I want them to be conscious and aware of what’s going on in the school. I don’t want other parents to go through what I went through and I want the schools to pay more attention.”
It has been difficult to quantify drug use among Arlington students. Parents fear parent-shaming — but the mother who spoke with ARLnow did say three other moms she knows are struggling with the same problems — and ARLnow couldn’t get data specific to drug overdoses involving minors.
The Arlington County Police Department provided the number of calls for service to Arlington Public Schools buildings involving reports of an overdose, which encompasses use of prescription drugs, illegal substances or alcohol.
The data shows there has been a relatively small but steady number of calls to buildings since 2018. Although there was a brief drop when schools were closed during the early stages of the pandemic, the rate hasn’t changed despite the decision to remove School Resource Officers from school grounds.
“Overall, the volume of juvenile-involved opioid cases remains limited across Arlington, however, all cases involving opioids are taken seriously and thoroughly investigated,” ACPD spokeswoman Ashley Savage said.
Anecdotally, there were three overdoses last academic year, according to Elder Julio Basurto and Janeth Valenzuela, who founded Juntos en Justicia, an advocacy group representing Arlington’s Latino population. This school year, they have only heard of the overdose involving the 13-year-old girl mentioned earlier.
Basurto and Valenzuela noted that they have heard teens take the drugs in the bathrooms and distribute them in nearby parks and by vape shops near the schools.
“It’s getting out of hand,” Valenzuela said. “If we don’t do anything to correct this we’ll lose a generation.”
https://twitter.com/ElderBasurto/status/1583435692331257856
What’s going on
Basurto said he has heard different descriptions of what kids are taking, and that ambiguity is part of the problem.
“We can’t confirm exactly what it is,” he said. “Something they smoke, something square in their mouth, they get high off that.”
He described some students obtaining blue pills that are then crushed into aluminum foil. Those are counterfeit oxycodone pills, known as “blues” or “M30s.”
“The real concern, the real worry, is these counterfeit pressed pills,” says Jim Dooley, who has taught more than 900 Arlingtonians how to administer Narcan through the Arlington Addiction Recovery Initiative. “What kids are getting — and adults — in a large number of cases, are pills that look identical to commercially manufactured pills: Adderall for attention, Xanax for anxiety.”
