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.”