The Wind Phone
Fentanyl Killed My Brother’s Child
By nineteen, Lily was the very definition of survivor, but a single mislabeled pill took her life
My nineteen-year-old niece, my brother’s child, and her twenty-year-old coworker, are dead.
They thought they were buying bars of Xanax, the high-dose kind that can be split into quarters. Seems they crushed it up, and each snorted one half.
That’s what the person who sold them the drugs said to do.
“These are strong,” they wrote in a Snapchat message. “… no don’t smoke it. That’s a waste … just do half.”
The pills contained fentanyl, a powerful opiate that is killing an average five people per day where we live, Texas.
Picture ten grains of table salt. That much fentanyl is a fatal dose.
A regular opiate user with tolerance could have survived half a bar. Not a 100-pound teenager who was not a regular user.
Observing the gutted parents, baffled brothers and sisters, weeping peers, I wonder, is this what war time is like? Every American family grappling with the reality or risk of a son, sibling, or best friend snuffed out before they have a chance to live?
