🍎 The overview: Three speakers at the South by Southwest Education conference in Austin promoted an increasing number of tools—such as naloxone access, early childhood intervention and safe drug disposal—that schools can use toward reducing drug abuse in their communities.
The three panelists joined Darrien Skinner, opioid generalist with Texas Health and Human Services Commission, on March 7 in discussing how best to undercut a current opioid crisis at the school level.
What Skinner said:
• Opioid-related deaths in Texas increased 82.6% between the start of 2019 and the end of 2021
• Synthetic or lab-made drugs accounted for more than 1,200 accidental overdose deaths in Texas in 2021
• Much higher than such deaths where heroin or prescription drugs were blamed that same year.
More statistics: Dr. Lisa Cleveland, a pediatric nurse practitioner and a professor at the UT Health San Antonio School of Nursing, said synthetic opioids such as fentanyl are now the most commonly drugs involved in overdose deaths nationwide.
🗣️ “Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin,” Cleveland said, adding that Texas is current only of only six U.S. states where fentanyl overdose deaths have risen more than five fold.
Read more here.
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