Griffin Tomassi was gasping for air when his younger brother found him in the middle of the night on Jan. 12, 2022. Griffin was born with a heart defect, so his family assumed he was suffering from some sort of cardiac emergency.
Griffin’s mother, Heidi Tomassi, remembers watching his staggered breathing while waiting for the paramedics. They did not know he was exhibiting what’s known as the death breath or death rattle, a common symptom of overdoses.
When paramedics arrived, Heidi heard a new word over and over again: Naloxone.
“We later learned that was an opioid antagonist that reverses the effect of opioids,” she says. “And so we knew that we were in for a long road ahead of us.”
Griffin survived his overdose, but recovery has not been an easy process. He’s spent a long time in and out of rehab. It shook his family and opened up a world of questions.
There often aren’t clear warning signs in these situations, even if there are small tells.
“There were some behaviors that kinda made us give a little head tilt, but Griffin is 20 years old, he’s working 40 hours a week and paying his bills,” she says. “And so you think, what is my place to question him?”
Griffin had been taking the pain reliever Percocet recreationally with his friends. He can’t pinpoint the date he first took a pill, but the counterfeit one laced with fentanyl that caused him to overdose was not his first.
“It was just the constant thought of not having enough,” Griffin says. “Constantly chasing that feeling of more, more, more, knowing that basically there was never an end to it.”
More than 850 people in the nine-county Kansas City metro region have died from fentanyl since 2018. Of those, 223 were in their 20s.
Johnson County reports that in 2020, only 7.5% of teens entering treatment at the mental health center reported using opioids but now that number has ballooned to over 50%.
Among teenagers, fentanyl was involved in 84% of all overdose deaths nationwide in 2021. From 2019 to 2021, the rate of fentanyl-related adolescent overdose deaths nearly tripled. Almost a quarter of those deaths involved counterfeit pills not prescribed by a doctor, just like in Griffin’s situation.
And Kansas leads the nation in drug-induced death rates among teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I learned all this information about fentanyl when I was already actively using, and by that point I was so far along that it didn’t matter,” Griffin says. “Initially, I wasn’t aware of it.”
Seeking better drug education
As a teen who wasn’t aware of fentanyl’s dangers, Griffin was definitely not alone.
Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. An amount equal to just the tip of a pencil can be lethal. Counterfeit pills that often contain lethal doses of the drug are easy to make. The Drug Enforcement Administration reports that 7 out of every 10 pills it seizes contain lethal doses of fentanyl. That’s up from 4 out of 10 in 2021.
But in a 2022 poll asking adolescents what drugs posed the greatest danger, fentanyl often ranked similarly to cigarettes and far below cocaine and heroin.
“For many years maybe part of that adolescent experience was to experiment with drugs or alcohol,” says Sierra Wright, community prevention manager at Johnson County Mental Health Center and a member of the county’s Prevention and Recovery Coalition.
“The terrifying piece is that now that experimentation can be deadly,” Wright says.
Teachers and school staff also lack awareness, Wright says.
The lethality, coupled with low awareness, is why more families, health experts and agencies around the metro are launching new prevention programs.
Earlier this year, Wright and the Johnson County Coalition — a group of community members that works on and evaluates county prevention efforts — launched “You Never Know,” a digital media campaign aimed at adolescents about the unreliability of pills obtained through friends, social media or anywhere else other than a licensed pharmacist.
The messaging is meant to be informative and educational rather than pointed and accusatory, emphasizing harm reduction strategies. For example, the website has information on naloxone and fentanyl testing strips.
They are using this tactic in part because more and more teens are obtaining drugs through social media.
“We really wanted to recognize that the current generation of young folks has more information available to them than ever before,” Wright says. “That sort of ‘scared straight’ messaging of the ‘80s and ‘90s isn’t effective for change.”
Facing Fentanyl at school and at home
Heidi Tomassi channeled her family's experience into raising awareness, talking to anybody she could. Eventually, she found herself in front of the Olathe Public School board.
They took what she told them to heart, helping her write a grant for a new position in the district. Earlier this year, Olathe Public Schools made Tomassi their first fentanyl and substance abuse education specialist, in charge of educating students, parents and faculty about the synthetic opioid.
Before this role, she spent several years as an alternative education aide with the district, so the transition was smooth.
One recent morning at Mill Creek Learning Center, in an auditorium a little before lunch, she met with around 25 students and over half a dozen teachers. After drawing the kids in with pizza, she showed “The New Drug Talk,” a half-hour documentary about the fentanyl crisis produced by the California nonprofit Song for Charlie.
Then she tried to coax them into sharing their experiences, which tends to be easier in smaller groups.
In private, she gets the best feedback. Some kids have told her the conversations at school led to constructive talks at home. She hopes these talks can help defeat an intense stigma among parents.
“After Griffin’s overdose, my husband couldn't even say fentanyl for the first six months,” she says. “He would whisper it. He felt it was such a big word and he couldn’t really grasp that our child had overdosed on this thing.”
Tomassi believes parents aren’t fully comfortable with the idea that fentanyl is in communities like Johnson County or that their kids could be at risk.
That’s one reason Olathe Public Schools named their campaign “Facing Fentanyl” — to ensure parents and students truly consider the realities of the situation.
Dr. Michelle DePhillips, a pediatric emergency medicine physician with Children’s Mercy Hospital, says staffers there are seeing more kids who’ve been using opioids for so long they’re suffering from withdrawal symptoms. That’s new, and something they weren’t as prepared for.
“Our resources always lack that of adults. I think they've been seeing this in the adult world for longer than we have,” DePhillips says. “Having the appropriate outpatient resources and therapy for young kids who are experiencing these issues is hard to find.”
DePhillips specified that these services are more available for children over 16, but there are a limited number of providers who will treat those 12 to 16.
Dephillips says she’s optimistic those resources will increase as more people talk about how opioids pose a threat to local kids. That’s important because toeing the line between pain relief and preventing addiction is more difficult than ever: fentanyl does have valid medical uses for pain relief or anesthesia, but it’s highly controlled in medical environments.
“When parents hear fentanyl they automatically go to a bad place. It’s almost to the point where we have to pull them back and reeducate them a bit,” says DePhillips, who recently wrote about ways parents should approach the issue.
Heidi Tomassi, meanwhile, is working to prevent situations from ever reaching the hospital. She hopes other school districts might create positions similar to hers, focused specifically on fentanyl.
Talking about drugs with family members isn’t easy, but those conversations can have a profound impact. Just ask Griffin Tomassi. As of Sept. 26, he was one year clean.
“What my mom is doing, just putting the information out there, it helps,” Griffin says. “I just think if everybody knows the whole truth, about how people my age are looking at this, or what it really is and really does, that would help.”
