MLB partners with fentanyl awareness nonprofit for All-Star Week

The MLB is hosting a major fentanyl awareness nonprofit organization at events surrounding its All-Star Game on Tuesday.

Song For Charlie (SFC) was invited by the league to install a booth with interactive displays in the Capital One All-Star Village in Arlington, Texas, during All-Star Week.

"Song for Charlie’s participation is such a high-profile national event validates the importance of educating the public about the risks of fentapills. At this stage of the fentanyl awareness movement, more families have heard about the problem, which is good news. An important next step is to deepen their knowledge and provide practical tools and strategies they can use to stay safe,” said Ed Ternan, who founded SFC with his wife Mary after their son Charlie, 22, died from taking counterfeit pills in 2020.

“Our interactive displays and resources are designed to get families comfortable having what we call The New Drug Talk or La Nueva Drug Talk. We can’t think of a better venue to engage both kids and parents together, in a positive environment, inviting them to help us spread our lifesaving message."

Ternan’s approach to fentanyl is educational, rather than punitive, focusing on getting information about the drug’s dangers to young people.

He told The Hill that fentanyl is raising death rates among two types of people: long-term opioid users at risk because fentanyl has replaced many plant-based opiates on the street, and users of other drugs who may encounter narcotics laced with fentanyl.

“So long-term opioid users further along in their in their drug use journey really have no choice but to use fentanyl because that's all they can get. And it's just so potent that it's impossible to accurately dose yourself. Over time, sooner or later, you're gonna get it wrong and die. So long-term opioid addicted people, opioid users are dying in record numbers,” said Ternan.

SFC focuses on the second group, trying to ensure more young people and their families understand the heightened risk that fentanyl has added to street drugs.

“When you focus on younger people, it is more of a lack of information that they don't understand the risk and that fentanyl is in these counterfeit pills, but also increasingly being found in in cocaine. And so they're dying from this lack of information and awareness of just how dangerous this is,” said Ternan.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 102,384 drug deaths were reported in the United States in the 12 months ending in January 2024, a drop from the peak 111,170 deaths reported in the 12 months leading up to May 2023, but still twice the rate from a decade ago, when fentanyl started replacing other black market opiates.

And fentanyl is affecting a wider swath of the U.S. population than the opiate prescription pill crisis.

According to a report published in March by the American Journal of Epidemiology, Hispanic drug overdose death rates in 2011 were 0.14 per 100,000 people, far below the 0.49 per 100,000 for white people. By 2019, that rate rose to 1.16 per 100,000, compared to 1.39 per 100,000 for white Americans.

In May, for Fentanyl Awareness Day, SFC expanded its “The New Drug Talk” campaign with “La Nueva Drug Talk,” a culturally competent version targeting Latino youth and their parents with fentanyl information.

“What we really understood was that there was an unwillingness to talk to their kids in the Latino community, that there's this stigma about drugs and about having these conversations at the dinner table,” said Renee Cuevas, a member of the SFC Latinx Advisory Team.

SFC will have resources for both campaigns, including fentanyl experts and bereaved family members sharing first-person perspectives at its All-Star booth, which was sponsored by Walmart and Meta.

 “The All-Star Game celebrates the very best of our sport, and it also provides a national platform to highlight causes that are important to Major League Baseball.  We applaud the outstanding work that is being done by Song for Charlie in the fight against fentanyl.  MLB is proud to host Song for Charlie at our Midsummer Classic in Texas, which will increase awareness and educate young people regarding this vital issue,” said Jon Coyles, MLB’s vice president for Drug, Health, and Safety Programs.