• Posted May 27, 2025

Fentanyl Fueling OD Deaths Among Teens, Young Adults

TUESDAY, May 27, 2025 (HealthDay News) — The powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl is involved in most fatal drug overdoses (OD) among teens and young adults, a new study says.

Worse, fentanyl taken alone – not in combination with other drugs – is responsible for many of these deaths, researchers found.

Fentanyl-only deaths among 15- to 24-year-olds soared by 168% between 2018 and 2022, and now account for most fatal ODs among that age group, researchers reported recently in the journal Pediatrics.

“Before we looked at the data, we thought we would find that the majority of fatal youth overdoses involved fentanyl combined with other substances, such as prescription opioids or cocaine,” said senior researcher Noa Krawczyk, associate director of the Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy at NYU Langone in New York City.

“Instead, we found the opposite — that most deaths were caused by fentanyl alone,” Krawczyk said in a news release.

For the study, researchers analyzed federal death records to examine trends in ODs among teens and young adults.

They specifically looked at synthetic opioids like fentanyl used alone or in combination with other drugs like benzodiazepine, cocaine, heroin, prescription opioids or stimulants.

Fentanyl is about 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin, posing an extreme overdose risk in even very small amounts, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says.

Researchers found the largest increase in OD death rates occurred among young people taking fentanyl alone, rising to 4.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2022 from only 1.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2018.

By comparison, the death rate of fentanyl combined with benzodiazepines was 0.33 deaths per 100,000 in 2022, while the fentanyl and cocaine rate was 0.89 deaths per 100,000.

All told, synthetic opioids accounted for 95% of the opioid death rate in 2022 — around 12.3 deaths of the 12.9 deaths per 100,000 linked to opioid OD, results show.

The death rate from any drug OD among young people 15 to 24 was just over 15 deaths per 100,000, the study says.

“Rates of fatal overdoses involving synthetic opioids alone were highest across all five years, regardless of age, sex, race and ethnicity, or region,” researchers concluded.

Results also showed changes in the groups most threatened by fatal fentanyl overdose.

White young people had the highest rates of OD involving fentanyl in 2019, but by 2022 the rates of fentanyl-involved deaths among Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native youth had outpaced that of whites, researchers found.

Overall, young males are 2.5 times more likely to have a fatal overdose involving fentanyl compared to females, researchers said.

The results highlight a need to better educate young people on the risks associated with fentanyl, researchers said.

“There are a variety of ways to engage youth and reduce their risk of overdose,” lead investigator Megan Miller, a research coordinator at the NYU Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy, said in a news release.

“Schools, places of employment, homeless shelters, child welfare services, and juvenile justice settings are all possible touchpoints to offer education and harm reduction tools such as naloxone and fentanyl test strips,” Miller said. 

“Our findings highlight the need to tailor these strategies to different youth groups based on the types of drugs they are using to help prevent further overdose deaths,” she added.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on fentanyl.

SOURCE: NYU Langone, news release, May 20, 2025