Fentanyl

People who have lost children to pills laced with fentanyl are demanding that lawmakers adopt stricter penalties and are pressuring Silicon Valley for social media protections.

The law could result in methamphetamine dealers facing a death sentence if drugs they distribute kills someone.

The bans from laws criminalizing drug paraphernalia adopted decades ago, but the devices are now recommended to help prevent overdose deaths. The Florida Legislature recently failed to end its ban.

The order targeted drugs known as nitazenes, which Moody’s office said have been linked since 2022 to at least 15 deaths in Florida, including five reported by the Pasco-Pinellas medical examiner.

Until 2018, fentanyl was mailed into the U.S. from China, but now it’s primarily transported across the Mexican border by cartels, says Dr. Kenneth Palestrant.

Court records show 35-year-old Monique Carter of Middleburg pleaded guilty Wednesday in Jacksonville federal court to tampering with a consumer product. She faces up to 10 years in prison.

While adult overdoses surged in the last decades, teens hadn't seen the same kind of death rates. But now fatal overdoses nearly doubled in one year and continued to rise in 2021.

Community activists blitzed beaches and warned spring breakers of a surge in recreational drugs cut with the dangerous synthetic opioid.

In statehouses across the country, lawmakers have been considering and adopting laws on two fronts: reducing the risk to users and increasing the penalties for dealing fentanyl or mixing it with other drugs.

A new wave of opioid deaths, fueled by fentanyl, is raising old fears in Palm Beach County. Meantime, sheriff's office policy on naloxone is an outlier in the state.