On Tuesday, November 21, a woman named Julie Hofmans came to Bourbon County High School to speak to students about the tragic loss of her son, Wyatt Williamson. Wyatt, at 23 years old had a big and shining personality, but passed in 2020, after taking a pill he thought was Xanax, but was laced with the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. To hear her story students went down to the auditorium doubled up by grades, the first group was freshmen and juniors, and the second group was sophomores and seniors. Everyone sat row by row as Julie stood on the stage in front of over a hundred people while distraught as she spoke about the loss of her son. Julie explained how Wyatt was prescribed Xanax, but ran out and began to seek the medication elsewhere instead of a legal pharmacy. Wyatt purchased a couple of Xanax from a stranger and took them with a friend, only one survived that night and sadly wasn’t Wyatt. Wyatt was not aware that the Xanax was laced with fentanyl. Thanks to their courage from Julie, BCHS students were informed about the dangers of fentanyl and the risk of buying drugs and other products from strangers.
What is fentanyl? Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as an analgesic (pain relief) and anesthetic. It is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin as an analgesic. Illicit fentanyl, primarily manufactured in foreign labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico, is being distributed across the country and sold on the illegal drug market. Fentanyl is being mixed in with other illicit drugs to increase the potency of the drug, sold as powders and nasal sprays, and increasingly pressed into pills made to look like legitimate prescription opioids. Because there is no official oversight or quality control, these counterfeit pills often contain lethal doses of fentanyl, with none of the promised drugs. DEA analysis has found counterfeit pills ranging from .02 to 5.1 milligrams (more than twice the lethal dose) of fentanyl per tablet. Unless a drug is prescribed by a licensed medical professional and dispensed by a legitimate pharmacy, you can’t know if it’s fake or legitimate. And without laboratory testing, there’s no way to know the amount of fentanyl in an individual pill or how much may have been added to another drug. Please, buy from a legal pharmacy and not from strangers. Save yourself.
