Man working to stop fentanyl deaths in U.S. in honor of son

INDIANAPOLIS — The number of fentanyl deaths reported to the Violent Death Reporting System from 2016 to 2020 has more than quadrupled making its largest jump from 2019 to 2020.

“People are turning a blind eye because there's no fire, there's no explosions, there's nothing. It's just this quiet merciless death,” Jim Rauh, the founder of Families Against Fentanyl, said.

In 2020, fentanyl was the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Two milligrams of fentanyl is a lethal dose, meaning one gram, could kill about 500 people. Carfentanil, which is 100 times stronger, approximately 500,000 people who could potentially die.

“I founded Families Against Fentanyl in order to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States,” Rauh said.

His passion for putting an end to fentanyl in our country is in honor of his son.

“My son Tom Rauh who was poisoned with straight acetyl fentanyl in 2015,” Rauh said.

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He’s a part of a club no parents want to be in.

“It's a club that people don't want to talk about because they feel that it's partly their fault. You know, you raised your children and when something like this happens, you just endlessly blame yourself,” Rauh said.

From July 2020 to June 2021, nearly 65,000 Americans died from synthetic opioids, most of which were fentanyl.

“I realized this whole thing was being blanketed by the stigma and the misperception of this of this stuff being just a drug that was affecting addicts and they were culpable in their own deaths because they made the conscious decision to take these drugs and they were addicted to,” Rauh said.

WRTV reached out to the Indiana Department of Health for a closer look at how fentanyl is impacting Hoosiers.

WRTV

In Marion County alone, from 2016 through 2020 the coroner’s office reports 1,177 overdose deaths with fentanyl.

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“We need to take care of this and do it now. We don't want to be at 9-12 going what didn't we see, what didn't we do? Well you didn't see that it was the number one killer of 18 to 45-year-olds and you're not watching what the hell is happening now,” Rauh said.

Rauh’s mission through Families Against Fentanyl is to get the government to recognize fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.

“It's a weapon of mass murder and if buildings and different things were being knocked down, trains were being derailed, bridges were being blown up and earthquakes were going on and there was other destruction going along with this, this would have been handled a long time ago,” Rauh said.

He hopes the United States will act quickly and soon to get fentanyl out of our country.

"This is an easy thing for us to do, it gives us ability to enforce it and our children's children won't have to go through the heartbreak that we've gone through,” Rauh said.

You can learn more about what Families Against Fentanyl and its mission here.

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