I think it’s very region and socioeconomic class dependent. During my four years in the late aughts, at a high school of 1,500 in a wealthy LA suburb, we had one person drown in a bathtub after a seizure, one fell to his death climbing a waterfall, and one died from cardiac arrest playing tennis in the heat of summer. We didn’t have a single fatal overdose despite a significant amount of drug abuse, both illicit and prescription (mountains of amphetamines and benzos especially).
A student overdosing at school would have been nothing short of shocking and would have brought down the entire town on the school
Plano was (and still is AFAIK) a wealthy suburb of Dallas at the time it became famous for heroin. That was part of the national narrative about it, in fact.
A student overdosing at school would have been nothing short of shocking and would have brought down the entire town on the school