US teens fastest growing group to die of Fentanyl overdoses: BBC

LONDON - More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year -- the vast majority were adults, but the fastest growing group to die of overdoses were teenagers, the BBC has reported.

Fentanyl is now increasingly being mass-produced into pills in rainbow colors to mimic prescription pills and target kids who are more willing to experiment with them, BBC said in a recent report.

The United States is an outlier when it comes to overdoses, with a death rate 20 times the global average -- although Scotland is not far behind, said the report.

"We are far and away the world leader in overdose death, unfortunately," the report cited Joseph Friedman, a substance use researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, as saying.

The overdose rate among school-aged children in the United States doubled between 2019 and 2020 and then rose a further 20 percent last year, he said.