One man’s warning after a lethal drug finds its way into a SWFL school

As a lethal drug has been making its way around Southwest Florida, a Lee County Sheriff’s Office captain said he has never seen a drug so potent in schools before.

It was in an Estero park where Dustin Ballentine started experimenting with drugs. He would eventually turn to opioids and heroin.

“Once you try these things for a couple days,” Ballentine said, “then you know the hooks are set and you are now physically addicted.”

Ballentine years of addiction led him to experiment with Fentanyl. It is a drug 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

“Someone that’s not tolerant, that doesn’t have a history of using and they got a hold of that,” Ballentine said. “Oh my god, that’s scary.”

But last week, Ayanna Felix got a hold of a lot of fentanyl. Deputies found nearly 3 grams in the 18-year-old’s backpack at school.

Rob Casale, a captain in Lee County Sheriff’s Office, said the investigation into where Felix obtained the powerful drug is still ongoing.

“It’s a very rare scenario for a kid to be in possession of this,” Casale said. “They do cause a great danger to all of those students who shouldn’t have been exposed to that in the first place.”

Casale said they had not seen an increase in Fentanyl or it’s potency across the country over the last couple of years. But still, former addicts like Ballentine have a message for anyone looking to experiment.

“It wants you locked up or it wants you dead,” Ballentine said. “You’re going to get one of those two if you mess around with it.”