BATON ROUGE — From high school star athletes to business professionals and soccer moms, the fentanyl epidemic is sparing no one. It is a grim reality East Baton Rouge Coroner Dr. Beau Clark sees every day, and one he is now sharing with a national audience.

Dr. Clark is a featured expert in the new docuseries "Fentanyl Stories," produced by the Victoria’s Voice Foundation. The series provides a harrowing look at the synthetic opioid crisis devastating communities across the U.S., including in Baton Rouge.

Clark appears specifically in Episode 4, titled "On the Front Lines," in which first responders and medical experts reveal the daily toll of confronting a substance so potent that a few granules—comparable to a fraction of a sugar packet—can be lethal.

The coroner’s alarms first sounded over a decade ago. In 2012, East Baton Rouge Parish recorded five heroin-related deaths. By 2013, that number surged to 35. The crisis peaked in 2021, when the parish saw a record-high 311 overdose deaths.

"They were adulterating all drugs with fentanyl," he explains. "If you bought cocaine, it might have fentanyl. If you bought methamphetamine, it might have fentanyl. People who normally were not abusing opioids would purchase things like marijuana and have a fentanyl overdose as a result."

The Victoria’s Voice Foundation was established by David and Jackie Siegel following the 2015 loss of their 18-year-old daughter, Victoria, to an overdose. Their mission is to provide drug education and life-saving resources to families nationwide.

According to provisional data from the CDC, an estimated 76,516 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. in a 12-month period ending in April 2025. Currently, fentanyl remains the number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 45.

However, overdose numbers have recently begun to trend downward both nationally and in East Baton Rouge Parish. Dr. Clark attributes this shift to a three-pronged approach: widespread distribution of Narcan, consistent law enforcement efforts, and border interdiction.

"I’m very hopeful," Dr. Clark says. "If we’re able to keep the pressure up on those items... we'll see the numbers continue to drop."

Click here for more information about Fentanyl Stories and Victoria's Voice Foundation.