Gulf Coast Life

We Get an Overview of Fentanyl

By Mike Kiniry,

Published April 23, 2018 at 10:02 AM EDT

Ball-and-stick model of the fentanyl molecule

It's been just over two years since Prince died of an overdose caused by taking what turned out to be fake Vicodin laced with fentanyl. We're hearing the word fentanyl show up in more and more news stories as the cause of overdoses during the ongoing opioid crisis, so we thought now would be a good time to dig deeper into the topic. We're joined by Brenda Iliff, Executive Director of the Hazelden Betty Ford facility in Naples, for a bit of a history lesson about the drug, and how it's winding up on the streets.

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Mike Kiniry

mkiniry@wgcu.org

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Julie Glenn

(1971 - 2022)

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Rachel Iacovone

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.

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