WEST JORDAN, Utah—When Jeannette Martinez hugged her grandson on the last night of his life, she could feel his heart pounding.
“Rio, are you doing meth?” she asked.
The powerful stimulant methamphetamine can cause cardiac strain, and Rio Ryan had complained of chest pains. Also alarming that evening in March: pinholes Ms. Martinez saw between Mr. Ryan’s fingers, where she said the 21-year-old injected drugs. He giggled in response.
He died the next morning in his basement bedroom at his grandmother’s house.
Testing revealed his body had a combination of drugs: meth and heroin, along with traces of fentanyl. Mr. Ryan, who had used meth and heroin for years, had recently started trying fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, he had told his family.
The drug combination put him at the center of a deepening complication in the nation’s overdose crisis. The pairing of meth, which can also cause psychosis and erratic, risky behavior, and opioids such as fentanyl, of which even small doses can prove fatal, is among the nation’s fastest-rising causes of overdose deaths.
One in five of the total fatal overdoses last year involved an opioid and a psychostimulant, a drug class dominated by meth, preliminary federal data show. A decade earlier, about 2% of drug deaths involved such combinations.
