There's been an alarming spike in overdoses in Dakota County.
Dakota County Sheriff Joe Leko is reporting that from last Friday through Tuesday of this week, there have been 23 suspected overdoses. Two of those turned out to be fatal.
"We have plenty of stories of parents that lost their young kid because they were either experimenting with drugs, and they got a pill in their hands and they didn't know what fentanyl even was," Leko told WCCO-TV. "But it killed them, they thought it was a different type of opioid, Vicodin, oxycontin, a painkiller."
Leko says in the past it was meth labs that were more prevalent, but now it's fentanyl is taking over. He says people need to spread the word that the drug is both dangerous and deadly.
Michelle Hein is the founder of Fentanyl Free Communities Foundation. Her son died six years ago when he took a pain pill that turned out to be fentanyl.
"We've been working in this arena for six years since we lost Tyler, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better," says Hein. "We see overdose deaths are down, but we know that's because of harm reduction strategies that people like us are out in community helping with year round. But you see that and it just brings everything right back to the day Tyler died."
She says there is also a growing amount of fentanyl powder out there that's being mixed into other illicit drugs, making them more deadly as well.
