struggled with addiction for ten years. this isn t my first time i ve been in the program. reporter: in and out of a program, overdosing more than once. his death ultimately caused by fentanyl. at one point when his girlfriend was asleep, i think that s when he decided he was going to take this dose of what he thought was heroin, but it was a very high level of fentanyl as well. and it doesn t take any of it to hardly kill you. reporter: fentanyl and synthetic opioids like it accounting for 64% of the record 100,000-plus deadly drug overdoses from april 2020 to april 2021. did the pandemic kill matthew? no. it just intensified. i think he was more emotionally fragile during that time. what did the pandemic do for addiction in places like kentucky? yeah, there was a clear and obvious increase in use,