#1 Killer in America and Few Know What It Is! Interview with Diane Urban, Founder/Director of APALD

Diane Urban is the Founder/Director of APALD. Diane’s son Jordan Garmatter passed away on April 6, 2019 from Fentanyl and Norfentanyl poisoning unknowingly.

In the United States, each day 275+ lives are lost to synthetic opioids. According to the CDC’s July 14th, 2021, report: Drug related deaths, primarily from Fentanyl, soared from 72,000 in 2019, to a record 93,000 in 2020. In March 2022, the CDC released 12-month provisional data and there were 105,000+ drug related deaths reported for the 12month period ending October 2021. The final statistics for 2021 are expected to show an exponential increase over previous years.

Although opioids accounted for around 75 percent of all overdose deaths during the early months of the pandemic, approximately 87 percent of those included synthetic opioids. These synthetic poisonings demonstrate a paradigm shift in comparison to the so-called drug overdoses we have seen over the years. These deaths are in fact not overdoses; they are synthetic poisonings from ingestion of a drug that is fatal. In most cases, the lethal drug ingestion is unbeknownst to the victim, resulting in drug induced homicide. APALD encourages awareness of the issue, and legislative changes related to drug trafficking and drug induced deaths which have resulted from lethal poisoning from synthetics such as Fentanyl and Carfentanil.