SARANAC LAKE — Jaime Puerta said Daniel would have loved the Adirondacks.
His son loved nature, played high school football in Santa Clarita, California and loved food from his father’s native country of Colombia.
Six years ago, Daniel died of fentanyl poisoning after taking a fake prescription pill, which looked like a pain medication but was laced with a lethal dose of fentanyl.
These fake pills kill thousands of people every year, often young people and often people without a history of addiction.
Puerta lost his son on April 6, 2020. Ever since, he’s been traveling anywhere he can to share his message with anyone who will listen – from FBI recruits to fraternities and sororities.
Last week, he was in Saranac Lake to speak with students at Saranac Lake High School, students at North Country Community College and the public at a session held at the college.
Puerta was invited here by Saranac Lake Police Department Chief Darin Perrotte, who met Puerta at the FBI National Academy training he went to earlier this year.
Perrotte attended all of the optional presentations in the evenings at the academy and said Puerta’s talk was “eye-opening.”
Afterward, he immediately texted both his kids — ages 14 and 18 — saying he may be a “paranoid dad,” but reminding them to never take pills from anyone, even if they look like the real thing.
Counterfeit pills are often killers of people who are not otherwise struggling with addiction, he said. They are pressed into the shapes of prescription drugs — OxyContin, oxycodone, Adderall, Xanax, Vicodin, Percocet and even Tylenol.
Puerta likened this to the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, when bottles of the over-the-counter pain reliever on store shelves were poisoned with potassium cyanide.
FALSE PRETENSES
Puerta was part of the documentary “Dead on Arrival,” which was co-produced by VOID – Victims of Illicit Drugs, a nonprofit that he co-founded.
Sitting in the front row, showing the documentary to the crowd at NCCC, Puerta cried. He said he still gets emotional every time, watching himself recount the morning he found his son unconscious in his bedroom. But he continues doing it, because he doesn’t want anyone else to experience what he has.
Daniel suffered from ADHD and the coronavirus pandemic lockdown was stressing him out. He just wanted to feel good, Puerta said. He was self-medicating.
Daniel connected with a dealer Snapchat and bought what he believed was a pharmaceutical-grade oxycodone. It was a fake pill. Puerta said half of it was fentanyl.
This was not an overdose, Puerta said, it was fentanyl poisoning. Daniel did not know what he was taking. He said he does not condone his son purchasing a prescription drug over social media, but if Daniel had indeed been sold a real oxycodone, instead of a counterfeit fentanyl-laced one, he’d still be alive today.
“He made one mistake,” Puerta said. “As children, we’re all supposed to make mistakes. We all are supposed to learn from the mistakes, but we’re not supposed to die from them.”
Perrotte said things are different than in the past, when someone would try cannabis and live another day to decide if they wanted to continue or not.
“One pill can kill,” he said.
Puerta said there are many reasons someone might take a pill from someone — they are experimenting, self-medicating, fitting in — taking something they believe will improve their mental health, relieve their physical pain, help them study longer, get back to playing sports faster, cure a headache, ease the pain of mental illness, cure boredom, sleep easier, be less anxious, make them stronger, thinner or smarter. They are the same reasons teenagers have always done drugs, he said. But, when fentanyl is laced into these drugs, they go from dangerous to deadly.
“They’re sold these things under false pretenses,” Puerta said.
“Recreational drug use does not exist anymore, not in today’s day and age,” he added. “Because everything out there today is made to drive addiction.”
Fentanyl is laced into cocaine, whether purposefully or as a result of cross-contamination in processing. It’s pressed into pills. It is laced into meth. It has even rarely been discovered in cannabis.
Puerta said this is all about greed and money. He said social media is exacerbating the problem, calling Snapchat “the largest drug trafficking organization in the country” because of its use for dealing drugs with its disappearing message features.
Fentanyl is an incredibly potent synthetic opioid. A two-milligram dose could be potentially lethal. It kills tens of thousands of people a year.
The DEA has found that around half of fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills contained a potentially lethal dose.
Puerta said this is not an “overdose” — it does not meet the definition of a dose over the body’s limit. He said the people killed by these counterfeit pills often did not know they were taking a dose of the number-one killer drug in America.
THE RISE OF THE RISK
A 2024 study from the New England Journal of Medicine using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that, in 2022, an average of 22 adolescents died from drug overdoses or poisonings every week. It cites “the widespread availability of counterfeit pills containing illicit fentanyl” as an important driver of this statistic, saying fentanyl is involved in at least 75% of adolescent drug deaths.
“Drug overdoses and poisonings are now the third-leading cause of pediatric deaths in this country, after firearm-related injuries and motor vehicle crashes,” according to the study.
Counterfeit pills tend to be the cause of drug poisoning deaths for younger people, according to the CDC.
The rise of fentanyl occurred quickly.
In 2020, more than 50% of overdoses were fentanyl-related, up from 3% seven years earlier, according to the CDC. 2020 had the highest number of drug-related deaths and 2022 had the highest number of fentanyl-related deaths.
Franklin County Community Services Director Suzanne Lavigne said that in her almost 40 years in the addiction treatment field, things are way different than when she started and the introduction of fentanyl is “terrifying.”
Perrotte said nearly all of the overdoses in recent years in Saranac Lake have been tied to fentanyl. He said it’s usually people who think they are using heroin or cocaine, but have substances laced with fentanyl. The SLPD responds to these calls a few times per year. He said the number of fatal overdoses is down from a few years ago, but that there was a drug-related death in town last year.
The counterfeit pills are more common on the West Coast, according to the DEA, but still prevalent in the east.
“I haven’t specifically seen them here, but I think I would be foolish to believe they are not,” Perrotte said.
Puerta said this affects everyone — rich and poor, rural and urban, young and old. Even military generals have told him they’re losing soldiers to it.
He said the best way to combat this threat is education.
At the time Daniel died, the government had all this messaging about washing hands, wearing masks and social distancing for the pandemic. Puerta said the country needs that level of messaging regarding fentanyl and counterfeit pills, but that has not happened.
Perrotte said Puerta’s talk at the high school and the college last week were powerful. The SLHS students had a lot of good questions for him, including some “real doozies.”
WHAT TO DO IF YOU SEE A DRUG POISONING
Cassidy Christian from the Essex County Department of Health showed students what to do if someone overdoses and gave out Narcan overdose reversal kits.
Christian said, to use the Narcan spray, place the tip in the nostril of the person overdosing, push in the plunger to spray it and wait two seconds to make sure it all goes in. Usually, people should become responsive within one to two minutes. If there’s no response, do another spray in the other nostril.
Christian said they should also call 911. The state’s Good Samaritan Law allows people calling 911 for a medical emergency to have immunity from being charged with drug possession or underage alcohol consumption.
If 911 is not called, Christian said the person giving them Narcan should stay with the person for at least five hours, because the drugs are still in their system and they can overdose again.
If Narcan is past its expiration date, she said it will still work. The Narcan the county distributes is four times stronger than what is used in hospitals, so even if it is less potent, it should still work.
Perrotte recommended people keep Narcan with them in case they ever see someone overdosing.
Christian said if it is kept in a car during the winter, to rub it between your hands to thaw out the liquid first. In a car in the summer, she said to shake it to cool it down first.
Any New York state resident can request Narcan be mailed to them by filling out a request on the Essex County Department of Health website at tinyurl.com/swfrzh54.
Narcan will not harm someone who is not experiencing an overdose.