Montana's Department of Justice is using opioid settlement money to pay for opioid reversal kits to be put in every middle and high school in Montana. "You don't have the luxury we had when we were your age to experiment with drugs," Janisch said, noting that traces of fentanyl have been found in Ritalin, Xanax, cocaine, ketamine, ecstasy and LSD. Just two milligrams of the substance, the equivalent of two grains of salt, is enough to cause a fatal overdose.
"I'm not telling you that to scare you, I'm telling you that because it's true," Knudsen said. The drug is most commonly found in pill form, despite being 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. This makes it more accessible and thus more dangerous because many people feel comfortable taking pills who may not have been inclined to experiment with drugs requiring needles, according to Janisch.
"It's normalized, we all take pills all the time," he said. There were 130 opioid overdose deaths in the state in 2022, up from 51 deaths in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nationally, there were 81,806 opioid overdose deaths in 2022, up from 23,157 in 2012.
It is possible overdose deaths in Montana are underreported, as some counties do not have the resources to pay for autopsies to determine the cause of death. The amount of fentanyl seized in the state has skyrocketed over the past few years, from 60,557 dosage units in 2021, to 188,823 in 2022, to 398,000 in 202.