Last February, when a teen-age boy died of a fentanyl overdose in Kyle, Texas, south of Austin, local law enforcement hoped that it was an isolated incident. “By all accounts, he did most of his association with the Austin crowd,” Kyle’s police chief, Jeff Barnett, recalls thinking. “He goes to school in Austin, associates with people from Austin, this is not particularly a Kyle drug problem.” Then, in May, a fifteen-year-old named Noah Rodriguez was found unresponsive after taking drugs; he spent four days in a coma before recovering. In June, another local high-school student suffered a fatal overdose. Weeks later and a few blocks away, a teen-age girl was found dead in her room with slivers of a blue pill on the windowsill by her bed. “At that point I knew—there’s something coming,” Barnett said. “This is a tidal wave.” The wave was still cresting. In August, two other local parents went to wake up their teen-age son for dinner and couldn’t rouse him. Days later, Rodriguez overdosed again, this time fatally. Teen-agers in the Hays County region overdosed, but did not die, in an elementary-school parking lot, during class, and in school bathrooms. Grieving parents paid for a billboard with pictures of some of the kids who’d died that year, grinning boys in T-shirts and hoodies, next to the words “Fentanyl Steals Your Friends.”
Two decades ago, Kyle was a town of some six thousand people. It has since octupled in size, and many of the fields where teen-agers used to chug beer at pasture parties have been paved over and replaced by town-house developments. On some farm-to-market roads, you can still spot a cow or two, but much of the county, one of the fastest-growing in the nation, has been overtaken by Austin’s growth. In the Hays Consolidated Independent School District, which includes four high schools, fourteen elementary schools, and six middle schools, test scores and median incomes are above state averages, though not dramatically so. The district adds around fifteen hundred new students a year. “We have a lot of people coming in for the technology industry in Austin,” Hays C.I.S.D. Superintendent Eric Wright told me. “We have a lot of first-time Texans that come from Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras.” The county’s infrastructure hasn’t caught up with its expansion: the Hays C.I.S.D. administration is run out of a former tractor-supply store and a suite of temporary buildings, and the county has retained some of the camaraderie of a smaller town.
When students started overdosing, the justice of the peace and local law enforcement both reached out to Wright. The deaths weren’t technically a school issue—none had yet happened on campus—but, to Wright, it seemed crucial to face the situation head on. “It kind of slapped me in the face when we had the third death. I just said, ‘We’ve got to do something different,’ ” Wright told me. “A lot of people battled that perceptual issue—if we share this information, because these deaths didn’t happen on school grounds, is that going to make our schools look less desirable for people that are moving in? And we discussed it, and we thought, Well, human life is too valuable to worry about that.”
Overdoses among young people are up across the country; nearly forty per cent of the fentanyl overdoses recorded by the Hays County Sheriff’s Office in 2022 involved people younger than eighteen. That rise has been attributed in part to a mental-health crisis among teen-agers, which has itself variously been blamed on pandemic disruptions, smartphones, social media, and political division. At the same time, synthetic opioids have made teen-age drug experimentation much more dangerous. Many of the Hays County kids who overdosed thought they were taking Xanax or Percocet; instead, the pills turned out to be counterfeits laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl is easier and cheaper to manufacture than natural opioids. It’s also much stronger, and can be unevenly distributed in counterfeit pills, making dosing more difficult. “My daughter told me that her and him were both taking Percs in Indiana,” Kerry Jeffrey, whose sixteen-year-old son has overdosed on fentanyl twice since he moved to Texas two years ago, told me. “But they were real Percocets. That’s what these kids think they’re taking, and it’s not. So is it worse down here? Yeah.”
A junior at Lehman High School, where three students have died after taking fentanyl in the past nine months, told me that this year already felt different, owing to security measures put in place after last year’s shooting in Uvalde: there are more security officers, more hall monitors, and all the doors are locked at all times. Now overdoses, and the fear of overdoses, are making school an even more stressful place. “We had a couple times where people have overdosed in bathrooms. You never used to see people wheeled out on stretchers, and that’s happened three or four times this school year,” she told me. “The nurses have Narcan hanging right by the door in case somebody needs to come in and grab it real quick.” Recently, in her psychology class, a student rested his head on the desk. “My teacher, she’s usually very calm. If people want to sleep in her class, she usually just lets them, because you can watch the lecture afterward. This kid had his hoodie on, and she didn’t realize he had his earbuds in. When he put his head down, she was calling his name, because that’s school protocol now, to wake them up, because of fentanyl. He didn’t respond at all, and her face just dropped. He was all the way at the back of the classroom, so she had to kind of weave through all the tables to get back to him. And you could see the relief when she realized that he was O.K.”
Hays C.I.S.D. administrators launched an awareness campaign, highlighting the impact of fentanyl on the community through posters, assemblies, and a series of videos. The most haunting video is very short: it shows security-camera footage of the high schooler overdosing in the elementary-school parking lot. The black-and-white picture is too grainy to see details, but the general series of events is clear enough: an S.U.V. backs into a parking place; a young man drags his limp friend out of the car and onto the pavement, throws water in his face, calls 911, and attempts CPR. (The student survived.)
The district’s administrators felt that their message was getting through. “Our goal is to keep kids alive, and not talking about the problem doesn’t solve it,” Tim Savoy, Hays C.I.S.D.’s chief communication officer, said. “It makes it worse.” Then, during winter break, five more students overdosed, including an eleven-year-old girl. Four of them survived; one, a ninth-grade girl, did not. “I’m afraid we’re still at the beginning of it,” Savoy said.
Some politicians have linked youth overdoses to federal immigration policy. “Illicit drugs are flowing into the country at an alarming rate because of Biden’s open border,” the Republican National Committee tweeted, in February. Texas Governor Greg Abbott cited the rise in youth fentanyl deaths as a justification for building a state-funded border wall. The Hays County deaths have become part of that narrative. Ohio Representative Jim Jordan invited Brandon Dunn, Noah Rodriguez’s stepfather, to testify before Congress earlier this year. “Many of these drugs are smuggled across the southern border every single day. That’s why it’s so important to fix this crisis,” Jordan tweeted the next day. In March, Texas Senator John Cornyn visited the school district. “We need to stop the drugs, and we need to secure the border. And that’s where the federal government is failing,” he told a group of families and students. Anthony Hipolito, a Hays County sheriff’s deputy, told me that he favored designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations. (“That’s a personal opinion, not a sheriff’s-department opinion,” he clarified.) But attempts to tie the fentanyl problem to immigration politics are misleading. Fentanyl is coming from Mexico, but it is most commonly brought through ports of entry, by U.S. citizens.
Directing blame at Mexico is also a way to avoid looking at how Texas fails children. A 2022 report from the nonprofit Mental Health America ranked the state last in the nation in access to mental-health care; nearly three-quarters of Texas youth who had a major depressive episode did not receive mental-health treatment, the worst rate in the country, according to the report. “We have pages and pages of addiction-treatment places to refer to in the Austin area, and the sad thing we’re running up against is that they’re full, they’re overwhelmed,” Savoy said. “There’s a sixty-day, ninety-day wait, or they’re not accepting new patients at this time. Or they’re not available for kids without insurance. We’ve seen several of the kids that have overdosed once have overdosed again, even after that traumatic overdose experience, because it’s so addictive, and because treatment is so hard to come by.”
Kerry Jeffrey struggled with addiction for most of her life. Just before she got sober, five years ago, she paid a private investigator to help her find her son, who’d been absorbed into the foster-care system. A year and a half ago, she regained custody of Christian, who is now sixteen, and he joined her in Buda, near Kyle. She had assumed that Hays County would be a tamer place to settle than Austin, but, during his first week at school, Christian was already coming home high.
Christian befriended Noah Rodriguez, a bright, impulsive kid who lived nearby. During the pandemic lockdowns, Noah had stopped taking his A.D.H.D. medicine. “I’m not in school—why should I?” he said to his mom, Janel. Without football practice occupying his time, he began congregating with kids at the park near his house. When Noah started high school, Janel was relieved that he’d be going to Johnson High School, which draws from the wealthier part of the county. “That’s a very new school. It looks like a college. It’s massive,” she told me. “I was so naïve. I think it was just overwhelming for him. And it turns out Johnson has one of the biggest drug problems.”
Last May, Janel was at a water park with her younger children when a Kyle police officer called to tell her that Noah had been found unresponsive at a friend’s house. When Noah awoke from his coma, he was tearful and apologetic. He thought only a few hours had passed; it had been four days. Janel and her husband called treatment centers, but none would take Noah without his consent, and he insisted that he didn’t have a problem. Even so, Janel was hopeful; that summer was one of the best they’d had as a family. Noah was dating a sweet girl, and when he wasn’t with her he seemed happy enough to hang around the house doing TikTok cooking challenges. Then, the first week of school, sixteen days after Janel gave birth to another son, Noah overdosed at his girlfriend’s house. This time, he couldn’t be revived. In the seven months since, Janel has given more than sixty presentations about her son’s death and the dangers of fentanyl at schools across Texas. She can usually tell the story with a certain amount of practiced remove, but, when she talks about the ragged days surrounding Noah’s death, her voice starts to collapse: “What happened? You promised us. What happened?”
Christian, devastated by Noah’s death, got a forearm tattoo of an ace of spades to commemorate his friend. He also continued to use drugs. His mother could tell when he was high, because his eyes got strange, as if they had changed color. She told Janel that she was just trying to keep him alive until March, when the insurance from her new job, which she hoped would help her get him into a treatment program, would kick in. In the meantime, she bought fentanyl-testing kits online to screen his urine for drugs and borrowed some of Janel’s small stockpile of Narcan. One evening, Kerry was getting ready for bed when she started to feel as though the silence in the house had an uncanny quality. She went into her son’s room and found him barely responsive. “I just went and got the Narcan and woke his little butt right up. He was really mad,” Kerry told me. “You’re doing everything you possibly can. You take their phone and they just get a Wi-Fi phone. You’re in contact with all the other parents. He has a curfew. He has locks on his windows.” When she reached out to treatment centers, the response was disheartening. Some had closed during the early phase of the pandemic; others were full, or prohibitively expensive—one church-run program charged eleven thousand dollars a month.
On Valentine’s Day, Christian piled clothes under his covers in the shape of his sleeping body and sneaked out of a window in his grandmother’s room, the only one in the house without a lock on it. After he and his girlfriend got pulled over that night after stopping in the middle of a four-way intersection, Kerry told the stunned police officer that she wanted to press charges. With a court order, it was easier to fast-track him into a short-term rehabilitation program in rural Texas, on a ranch ringed with barbed wire.
Kerry had been taking classes to become a substance-abuse counsellor after regaining her son. “I blame myself, you know—if I had been normal, if he hadn’t been through so much and I had been there, there wouldn’t be these issues,” she told me. But her coursework helped remind her that addiction exists in a wider context. “People want to put it all in the parents’ hands, but it’s the community,” she said. “There need to be options and there aren’t options.”
Like many other Hays County institutions, the Kyle Police Department has outgrown itself, and will soon be moving to a new headquarters with eight times the square footage of the current one. Chief Barnett met me in his dim office, where the windows were hung with strings of blue-and-white Christmas lights. Barnett is a compact man with an East Texas accent strong enough that he told me that Siri sometimes has a hard time understanding him. When Barnett was growing up, kids hung out in the Dairy Queen parking lot. “I don’t think there’s that single point of congregation anymore,” he said. Teen-agers today struck him as more isolated, taking pills alone in their rooms.
Until recently, adult overdoses in Kyle were typically treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one. “If there was no threat, no sign of trauma, it didn’t result in death, we weren’t investigating anything,” Barnett said. “That changed when the young people started dying.” Local law enforcement is now aggressively pursuing drug cases, often in partnership with federal investigators. A few weeks after Noah Rodriguez’s fatal overdose, Kyle police arrested a twenty-year-old man and a sixteen-year old boy on drug-related charges. Several other local teen-agers have since been arrested, including an eighteen-year-old who faces charges “involving the delivery of fentanyl and the death of a child in Hays County,” according to the department. In my conversations with Hays County officials, the language of destigmatization and harm reduction often bumped up against the inherited language of the drug war. Some kids who used drugs were depressed or confused; others were cold-blooded perpetrators. When I asked Barnett about the sixteen-year-old his department had arrested, his voice sharpened. “That kid is not a victim,” he said. “That kid is a street-hardened kid, from what I understand.”
On the state level, Texas has largely pursued a punitive, zero-tolerance approach to the crisis. Fentanyl-testing strips are still illegal in Texas, although Abbott recently signalled support for their decriminalization. Earlier this month, the State Senate unanimously passed a bill that would classify fentanyl deaths as poisonings, which would mean that people who make or distribute pills that result in an overdose death could face murder charges. “Here we go!” Abbott tweeted. “You kill Texans with fentanyl. You get charged with murder.”
Janel Rodriguez told me she believed she knew who had supplied the fentanyl that contributed to her son’s overdose. He’s facing drug charges, although they’re not related to Noah’s death. “It’s sad. He’s a kid himself,” she told me. She said that she had been thinking about what she would say to him, if it ever came to that: “It would be along the lines of, how I know Noah really valued his friendship, and how he was a friend to Noah. And how Noah helped him out. So the fact that he could—on the other hand, he’s nineteen, and I would love to see him make something of his life. I know what kind of person Noah was. He had a really big heart. He valued his friendships. And it’s just sad that this turned out the way it did.” ♦
