Half of 8th Graders Don't Think Trying Fentanyl Once Is Dangerous. That's Not a Knowledge Gap, It's a Body Count

Give a room of eighth graders a survey with the question “how much risk do people take if they try fentanyl once or twice,” and 52% of them will tell you: not much. Not “I don’t know.” Not “some risk.” Not much risk at all — for a drug that’s now involved in at least three out of four teen overdose deaths in this country, according to CDC data.

That’s the headline number from a new analysis of the 2025 Monitoring the Future survey, the federal government’s flagship annual check on what teenagers actually think about drugs, published July 7 in JAMA Network Open by Richard Miech and colleagues at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Miech has run this survey — or worked alongside the people who built it — for decades, and he’s blunt about what he found, telling reporters: “Our biggest finding is that most eighth graders simply don’t know that fentanyl can be lethal.”

An eighth grader who doesn’t believe fentanyl can kill them the first time isn’t ignoring a warning — nobody ever gave them the right one.

Here’s the breakdown from 3,820 students surveyed nationally in 2025, weighted to represent 8th, 10th, and 12th graders across the 48 contiguous states. Among 8th graders, 47.8% said trying fentanyl once or twice carries great risk, 57.2% said the same about occasional use, and 66.5% about regular use. By 12th grade those numbers climb — 69.8%, 78.5%, 84.8% — but even among kids three years from adulthood, roughly 30% still don’t think trying fentanyl once is a real danger, and 15% don’t think regular use is either. Perceived risk rises with age and rises with frequency of use. Fentanyl doesn’t follow that curve. One exposure can be fatal.

The Gap Between “Risky” and “Deadly” Is Where Kids Die

Researchers who study teen drug use lean hard on a concept called “perceived risk” — basically, how dangerous a kid thinks a drug is before they’ve tried it. It sounds like academic throat-clearing, but it’s one of the most consistently predictive variables in the field: when perceived risk of a drug drops among teenagers, use goes up a year or two later, almost like clockwork. This isn’t new. Lloyd Johnston, the psychologist who co-founded Monitoring the Future in 1975 and remains a co-author on this year’s report, built his career partly on documenting that pattern across marijuana, cocaine, and prescription opioids. Kids don’t need a health-class poster to internalize that a drug is dangerous — cultural signal does most of the work. The problem with fentanyl is that the cultural signal hasn’t caught up to the pharmacology.

Alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana all have a dose-response relationship teenagers intuitively grasp: try it once, probably fine; use it a lot, that’s when it gets dangerous. Miech’s team points out that this framework is exactly backwards for fentanyl, “which can be fatal with one exposure.” A kid applying the logic that got them through a lecture on binge drinking to a fentanyl-laced pill is applying the wrong model to the wrong drug — and the survey shows that’s happening at scale.

Nobody’s Seeking Out Fentanyl. That’s What Makes This Worse

Almost no teenager who dies from fentanyl went looking for fentanyl by name. The actual exposure route is counterfeit pills — pressed tablets sold on Snapchat or Instagram as Percocet, Xanax, or Adderall that are secretly cut with, or entirely made of, illicit fentanyl. The CDC’s own analysis of counterfeit pill overdoses found that seven out of every ten counterfeit opioid pills tested by the DEA in recent years contained a potentially lethal dose. Stephen Lambert, coordinator of prevention education for the Orange County Department of Education, put it plainly: “A lot of it is accidental. Young people believe they’re misusing medications like oxycodone or pain relievers, or anxiety medications like Xanax, but in fact they’re counterfeit pills tainted by fentanyl.” His advice on anything bought off a peer or a stranger online: “Really not to trust your eyes. It’s virtually impossible to tell what is counterfeit.”

Stephen Lambert, coordinator of prevention education for the Orange County Department of Education, put it plainly: “A lot of it is accidental.

This is exactly why the perceived-risk gap matters more than it looks. Miech’s team makes the connection explicit in the paper itself: warnings that “students shouldn’t take counterfeit drugs because they may be laced with fentanyl won’t have much effect if students don’t know how dangerous fentanyl is” in the first place. You can’t scare a kid off a pill with a chemical name that doesn’t register as lethal to them. Dr. Manassa Hany, an addiction psychiatrist at Northwell’s Zucker Hillside and South Oaks hospitals, called the numbers “terrifying” for kids at “the age where people start to experiment,” reaching for a blunter comparison than most researchers would: fentanyl, she said, is “a rat poison that a kid is trying once or twice and thinks it is OK.” One dose can be fifty to a hundred times stronger than the drug a teenager thinks they’re taking. There’s no safe amount of a guessing game.

What This Data Can and Can’t Tell You

A few honest caveats — this is self-reported survey data and it deserves scrutiny, not just alarm. Monitoring the Future lets students answer “can’t say, drug unfamiliar,” and 9% to 17% picked that option depending on grade, meaning a meaningful chunk of eighth graders may not have a clear mental model of what fentanyl even is, separate from whether they think it’s dangerous. Some portion of “52% don’t see risk” is closer to “never heard of it” than “heard of it and shrugged.” The study is also cross-sectional, not longitudinal — it tells you what teenagers believed in 2025, not that low perceived risk directly causes any individual overdose; the decades of research linking the two, dating to Johnston’s earliest work in the 1970s and 80s, is correlational and population-level, even if it’s held up across drug categories and decades. Worth naming honestly, too: Hispanic eighth graders reported the lowest perceived risk across all three fentanyl categories, while rural and non-Hispanic white students reported the highest — a pattern that likely maps onto who prevention messaging is and isn’t reaching, not onto anything inherent about any group of kids.

None of that changes the headline finding. It sharpens it: the fix isn’t a scarier assembly, it’s specific, repeated, credible information that fentanyl is lethal at first use and already sits inside the counterfeit pill economy teens are exposed to — not information that assumes a 13-year-old already knows what fentanyl is.

If you’re a parent, sibling, or case manager reading this looking for one concrete thing to do: fentanyl test strips are legal harm-reduction tools in most states now, and they exist precisely because “don’t take pills from people you don’t know” isn’t a message every teenager will follow every time. We wrote about the state-by-state fight over legal status for tools like these — worth reading if you want the landscape. Pair that with plain, repeated, non-hysterical conversation about what’s actually in a pressed pill, and you’re doing more than any assembly did for the generation before this one. Browse more coverage in The Crisis Data and our ongoing opioids reporting.

The 8th graders in this survey aren’t reckless. They’re accurately applying a risk model that works for beer and doesn’t work for fentanyl, because nobody built them a better one. That’s on the adults, not the kids.