With thousands of lives cut short by tainted drugs, Sofia Christoff said she considers herself one of the lucky ones. However, she still bears the weight of her brush with death.
What is the address of your emergency please come now my daughter’s unconscious it’s the sound of sheer panic how old is she 16 sophia sophia she’s on her back please hurry got them on the way it was a quiet afternoon near boulder colorado when ryan kristoff finds his then 16 year old daughter sophia barely breathing i’m pushing on her chest and it’s making some
Noise but she’s unconscious okay she’s on her back on her bed listen carefully and i’m gonna tell you how to do chest compressions within minutes sergeant david cohen with the lafayette colorado police department pulls up i’m in an account with you okay so try and go with the case i’m counting okay keep up with that pace if you can okay i’m responding i think it
Might be hold on up here up here upstairs cohen sprinting up the stairs and into sophia’s bedroom what is her name sophia let me take over cpr sir does she use narcotics sophia’s father telling him he doesn’t think so he only knows of her smoking a little weed but officer cohen’s experience told him otherwise we get 21 slight pulse in our canyon minister as the
Approaching ambulance gets closer the narcan kicks in she’s breathing she’s breathing yes sir sophia had taken a percocet that came from a drug dealer not knowing it was laced with fentanyl a synthetic opioid used to treat severe pain that is 50 times more powerful than heroin i’m bored in my room and i notice you know i have half this pill why not like it’ll
Make me chew up and i crushed it up took a line felt kind of sparkly for two seconds and then i woke up in the hospital where do you think you would be now had you not overdosed i think i could have been in a worse spiral or as far as i know i could have been dead i could have been struggling but i think that i’m grateful for it from coast to coast in every
Corner of the u.s deaths from fentanyl overdoses are soaring more than a hundred thousand people died from drug overdoses in a 12-month period ending in october of 2021. recent cdc data revealing two-thirds of those deaths are linked to fentanyl and those deaths doubling over the past two years there’s no question in my mind that the vast majority of chemicals
Are coming from china and going to mexico and being mass produced into fentanyl into methamphetamine and increasingly into the counterfeit pills that we see on our streets and fentanyl is sometimes mixed in other illicit drugs heroin meth and cocaine it’s a cheap high or high but also can be a lethal combination a tense scene in wilton manors multiple spring
Breakers overdosing rushed to the hospital the culprit first responders say drugs laced with fentanyl when i found out that he was doing fentanyl every day i didn’t know you know if i was going to get that call he was living life-loving it’s heavy it’s heavy right now users often have no idea she supposedly had taken a percocet and that percocet later you know
Was laced with fentanyl and that took that took her life this is an epidemic that’s been hidden by the pandemic and we need more attention paid to this issue after everything sophia kristoff and her dad have been through playing softball together is familiar and comfortable a reminder of a simpler time now in her junior year sophia looks forward to taking the
Field with her team next season she loves going to games and she loves playing i do too and it’s really grateful that we’ve been able to have that to bond over and spend time together but through her sophomore year sophia was hiding a secret from her father what did your dad know about what was going on he knew i was smoking weed sometimes so he had no idea and
I think that’s part of that is because it all happened so fast in the span of just one year she started experimenting with a long list of drugs she was suspended from school and her grades fell cocaine xanax ketamine wands acid shrooms adderall so yeah just like everything i could get my hands on i felt stupid um that i should have known especially with my
Own history it’s not like i think oh she’s terrible because she did those things or my girl would never do that i just didn’t think she was doing that and these are all plugs that i bought from before sophia says buying drugs is as easy as sending the right emoji to a so-called plug a dealer who finds customers on apps like snapchat i’m looking for a little plug
Emoji or like a fire emoji or just whatever emoji the normal dealers i have they’re like yo hit my line for guess and then you’re like yo you got you got whatever like slang terms for whatever and it can happen that fast just by communicating on snapchat and by searching with the right emoji if you know where to go it’s really easy it’s a terrifying new playbook
For drug dealing now so common the u.s drug enforcement agency releasing this cheat sheet for parents and guardians showing the emojis commonly used to buy drugs on social media i cannot emphasize enough how deadly this drug is to human life especially to unsuspecting youth in our community these these pills are widely available and often sold for dollars a piece
On social media and pictures showcasing how counterfeit pills they’ve seized from drug dealers look eerily similar to the real medications doctors prescribe just days ago snapchat issuing a statement detailing their efforts to flush out drug related content and announcing steps to curb illegal activity saying they have zero tolerance for the promoting of illegal
Drugs on their platform 20 miles south of lafayette denver colorado police chief paul payson feels like he’s at war i get daily reports of suspected individuals who have passed away as a result of fentanyl overdoses every day your hearing of death that’s somebody’s family that has just been devastated by fentanyl by this very deadly drug we have a situation where
A father lost two sons on the exact same day from a fentanyl overdose the ripple effect yeah cannot be denied of what happens especially when we have kids dying at school passing out in the bathrooms what are you seeing as the biggest problem when it comes to the actual ingestion of fentanyl folks think that this might be something else that they’re ingesting so
Bringing awareness to this issue that uh that pill may not be percocet that pill may not be xanax that that pill may contain fentanyl and potentially could be deadly is critical it’s so cheap it’s so easy to move it’s so addictive for the end user we are going to need everybody coming together as a country as a state federal state local law enforcement colorado’s
House of representatives introducing a bill last month to enact stiffer criminal penalties on those involved with the sale and distribution of fentanyl is there an end in sight i’m not seeing that end i’m seeing this issue getting worse i’m seeing more and more people dying as a result of this issue we need to do something about this immediately officers like sergeant
David cohen are on the front lines day after day and this time he saves sophia from becoming yet another statistic when did it become clear to you that it was an overdose i mean i don’t know if it ever became clear to me until i administered narcan and it worked between training and experience and being able to look around the room and seeing miscellaneous drug
Paraphernalia that goes a little bit above and beyond normal marijuana and alcohol use and so because of that you knew to administer the narcan yes ma’am if it’s not needed and you use it it’s gonna do no harm right um if it’s needed and you use it it’s only gonna do good these kids are dying for one bad decision and it almost happened to her it’s a hard time to
Be a parent of a teenager and even harder to be a teenager with thousands of lives cut short by tainted drugs sophia is one of the lucky ones but she still bears the weight of her brush with death that’s been a very big part like the guilt that comes with the like i see firsthand the effects it had on everybody being here thinking like damn all these kids are out
Here overdosing and never coming back and i’m the one that came back like why me so i’m just trying to have the mindset that i’m here and i was a lucky one and i gotta make it worth it this is what’s in the box there’s two of these her father ryan now on a mission to educate teens and parents on the dangers of dabbling in drug use if someone were to watch this
Video what do you want them to know and what do you want them to take away from it first of all i want them to know more about sofia than just this video and that’s a moment in her life but that’s not who she is i would want people to see that it can happen to even someone like sophia even their daughter even their son even people you think was the least likely
To happen to it can happen hi everyone george stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the abc news youtube channel if you’d like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel and don’t forget to download the abc news app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
Fentanyl overdose survivor shares her story | Nightline By ABC News