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---
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Tag: ["🫀", "💉", "🇺🇸"]
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Date: 2024-12-08
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DocType: "WebClipping"
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Hierarchy:
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TimeStamp: 2024-12-08
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Link: https://sundaylongread.com/2024/12/04/propublica-opioids-teens-story-lizzie-presser/
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location:
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---
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Parent:: [[@News|News]]
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Read:: 🟥
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---
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```button
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name Save
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type command
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action Save current file
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id Save
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```
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^button-TeensandfentanylNSave
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# ‘Teens and fentanyl’: ProPublica's Lizzie Presser weaves an emotional story about the impacts of the drug trade - The Sunday Long Read
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In one of her latest [longform articles for ProPublica](https://www.propublica.org/article/teens-fentanyl-percocet-green-bay-wisconsin-maylia-sotelo-jack-mcdonough), reporter Lizzie Presser tells the story of teenagers caught on opposite sides of the drug trade: those who are selling opioids, and those who are using them.
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ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser
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In her piece, Presser weaves in background about Maylia, a 15-year-old who was selling fake Percocet pills but wasn’t stopped by police in time, and Jack, an 18-year-old who overdosed on one of those fake pills, which contained fentanyl. Both teens found themselves at the mercy of institutions that were “unprepared” to fully deal with either situation, Presser writes.
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“The more that I dug into the world of teenagers and opioids, and in particular these days that’s fentanyl, the more I felt like: ‘How are these kids surviving?’” Presser told The Sunday Long Read.
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On one hand, Presser said, it’s very difficult for teens to get the treatment they need; getting access to buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid addiction, is difficult for adults and “so much worse for minors.” And on the other, Presser was noticing a “surge” in drug-induced homicide charges and prosecutions — including for minors, like Maylia.
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“So I really wanted to tell a story that got at this impossible position that kids find themselves in: Where they’re at risk of overdosing…and at the same time, they’re also at risk of being charged with homicide and put in prison for a very long time,” she said.
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> “I really wanted to get at that space: How difficult it is to survive until 18 years old as a teenager who is struggling with an opioid addiction.”
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*The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.*
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***Amanda Ulrich, Sunday Long Read:* \[How did\] Maylia’s case end up being the one that you focused on here?**
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*Lizzie Presser, ProPublica*: There were two reasons why Maylia was interesting to me. One was that I could see in the criminal complaint that Jack had been to rehab, and so I knew there was going to be a story there about his search for help with his addiction. And then Maylia, I thought, was particularly interesting to write about because she wasn’t this kind of “perfect victim” of the judicial system, right? Like she wasn’t a friend who gave a pill to her neighbor or her classmate.
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She was a young girl, a 15 year old, who was dealing, she was selling fentanyl. And I wanted that story, because that is part of what is happening across America. In my reporting, I was meeting kids who were dealing fentanyl under the age of 18, all across the country, and I didn’t want to just tell a story of a mistaken charge.
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**So you knew you would have that piece from Maylia — did you know if you would be able to talk to any members of Jack’s family in the beginning, or did you just push forward hoping you’d be able to tell both of those sides?**
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I had a strong feeling that if I couldn’t get Jack’s family, I would probably kill the story. I reached out to Jack’s mom pretty early — I actually reached out to a friend of Jack’s first, and she put me in touch with Jack’s mom as well. And really, from the get-go, Carrie (Jack’s mother) did want to talk, and did think it was super important to tell Jack’s story, and she wanted to work with me on it. So once I had both sides talking to me, I knew that I would be able to work on this piece.
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**You write that 22 high school-aged kids are dying from overdoses every week. In other words, that’s a classroom’s worth of students. Do you think part of the problem is that people aren’t realizing how big the problem really is? That they’re not realizing teens are being swept up in this on the scale that they are?**
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Yes and no. If you work at a school where kids are using fentanyl, and you’re a teacher there, you’re not oblivious to it. But I think that when it comes to pediatricians’ offices, they don’t know, because the volume isn’t that high; I mention that, according to the best data available, there are over 300,000 young people under the age of 18 who have an opioid-use disorder. That’s the estimate right now. That’s a lot of kids, but they’re not all concentrated \[in one geographic area\], so it’s difficult to find them and to touch their lives. And when they can’t get into the centers that generally treat addiction for adults, it’s unclear where they’re going. And that’s something I also wanted to get across in this piece: How are we catching these kids? How are we giving them a place to find the help that they need?
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**You write that the amount of fentanyl that could kill someone, if you poured that amount on a penny, would only cover Abraham Lincoln’s ear. Why were comparisons like that important for you to weave in?**
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I think part of the hypocrisy of the law, and of the way that we are thinking about kids and fentanyl, is that at the same time we’re seeing all these news articles (about “another child dies of fentanyl overdose”), we’re seeing kids like Maylia being charged with homicide, as if they knew that the drug they were giving to someone else could kill them. But the truth of the matter is these kids don’t understand. And that’s something that we have come to terms with in our legal system — that kids are not as able as adults to compute the consequences of their actions. And neither Maylia nor Jack was understanding that just the tiniest bit too much of fentanyl that was in these pills could kill.
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## Like this story?
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Subscribe to our free newsletter for more great reads in your inbox every Sunday.
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**Another big part of your story, the emotional backbone of it, involved the texts and the letters and the journal entries that you included from both Maylia and Jack. Is there a piece of writing from either one of them that sticks with you?**
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I think there are two that come to mind. It was very hard to get a sense of where Jack was in his head with his addiction. I think one thing that a lot of people don’t understand — and quite frankly, what took me a long time to get my head around — is the ambivalence of addiction: How you can want to get better and want to keep using at the same time. This is kind of a hallmark of some addictions. And so there are moments in this piece, where you can see that Jack is saying to his girlfriend’s mother: “Your daughter is in trouble, and we took the wrong road, and you need to get help for her.” He is well aware of how deep into this addiction he is. And then there are other moments in which he’s saying to a doctor: “I’m fine. I’m fine. I don’t have any kind of dependency, I’m good. I don’t know why I’m at this rehab at all.” I thought it was really important to draw out that nuance in this piece. Addiction is super complicated to treat for this reason as well, not just because there isn’t access to the medication, but because you are working with patients who are holding these two things at once: this desire to get better and this desire to keep using.
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With Maylia, what I found really hard to read in her journals were paragraphs in which she was blaming herself. And I think on the one hand, I was kind of in awe of her ability to take accountability for her actions and to write into that. And on the other, I found it deeply disturbing that she had grown up in these horrible conditions, with a mother who had her own struggle with addiction, who wasn’t keeping her safe and fed; \[Maylia\] didn’t have the opportunity to get three meals a day for most of her life, so she was hungry for most of her life. So the fact that she got to a place in her journey in jail where she was blaming herself for what had happened deeply disturbed me, that we don’t have a safety net available for kids like Maylia, to help her off of this path that she was on at a younger age.
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**You write at one point that in Maylia’s case, “social workers had ignored her needs since she was an infant, and when the state did act, it sent her directly to criminal court.” Do you think there’s any specific change that could have happened in Maylia’s life, or any specific person who could have acted, that would have changed the course of all of this?**
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I think the counterfactual is just impossible to know. But I think what I was trying to get at with that summation was that we have established in this country that children are entitled to shelter and food. And Maylia wasn’t getting shelter or food, or any other kind of protection from her mother, that children in this country have the right to. We weren’t treating her like a child who was in need of protection. And so once she slips through these cracks — slips through the cracks of teachers who are seeing that she is not doing well at home; social workers who are getting complaint after complaint about a mother who is allegedly abusive and addicted to all kinds of drugs and not feeding her kids and allowing sexual predation in the home — no one has stepped in to take Maylia under the care of the state. How do we have a system that is this negligent for kids, and then at the same time, when it comes to a point where they fall into the hands of police, we treat them as if they are adults? What kind of a society is this, if that’s how we are going to treat kids like Maylia, who are deeply in need of protection?
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**The last quote of your story is gut-wrenching, with Jack’s mother talking about her stages of grief and the complexity of this situation. She says: “I lost my son, my only child. And here is Maylia, who didn’t have a mother. So, it’s like, I’m childless, she’s motherless, and we’re in this situation together, but against each other.” When you heard that, did you think that this might be a way to sum up this story with all of its complexity and emotion? What do you hope readers take away from this story?**
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When she said that, it really struck me. It was a way of kind of twisting the lens a little bit, for me to see it differently. But I felt so surprised by her revelation there. I think when I came to this story, I was interested in many different victims of the opioid crisis among kids. And in that moment, what you are hearing Carrie articulate are these ghosts of the opioid crisis: Maylia doesn’t have a mother, because her mother had her own addiction to opioids; Carrie doesn’t have a son, because her son found himself addicted to opioids. And here they are, fighting each other in court, when they are so deeply bonded by this similar and opposing trauma. That’s why I felt like it was such a powerful place to end. There’s no winning here. Both of these people have been robbed of a family member, and of an opportunity to be a family member. Maylia, with her mother, and Carrie, with her son. And I was hoping that’s what would come through in that quote.
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*Compiled by **Amanda Ulrich**. Photos courtesy of **Lizzie Presser** and **[The Javorac](https://www.flickr.com/photos/thejavorac/6556949031/in/photolist-aZq5vn-Fax2Qo-bdTMdX-5WHHQw-4UiRny-6d2W6N-dWKDSq-22ii7Lh-8S5Btn-8pJqZ-6eHN2-D3X8F-54dH9T-FqENz-21QboUf-9mUE5s-SXxwYB-f1uFuv-5YNb7p-4wP9QZ-3LbDz-bXUPx-53wpf4-7aEMW6-cHhfjS-2aC7WKZ-RzYJGP-cHhoMy-23JtFmy-ryGj7a-rhbBW2-49TkM1-MKE7C8-6J1szg-dBQqK-ei6szp-ryGjaB-7oZbbo-rBDfSX-aCEmz6-2fwK7eH-8y7j9Q-dJB7Kt-dJGAyL-3aRWvs-25BM6j6-KKsGL-qV2wC4-9Ti8-9sS84N)/****Creative Commons via Flick*r.
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---
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`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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