This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

SACRAMENTO COUNTY —

A seventh person has died of a fentanyl overdose in Sacramento County.

Family confirms that Jerome Butler, who was in a coma with liver and kidney failure after taking a fentanyl pill, was taken off life support on Wednesday afternoon.

Natasha Butler, his mother, says it started on Friday when her son purchased what he thought was Norco from someone he trusted, not knowing it was actually fentanyl, a powerful opiate used to treat pain in terminal cancer patients.

He was found unresponsive on Saturday.

Jerome Butler is among more than two dozen overdoses in Sacramento County in the last week.

Both the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency are investigating where the fentanyl pills came from.

The synthetic drug is up to 50 times more powerful than heroin, the CDC warns. Fentanyl is up to 100 times more potent than morphine, a commonly-administered pain medication in hospitals.

‘The scope of the problem’

The United States has seen an uptick in prescription drug abuse in recent years.

Drug overdose deaths in the United States hit a record-high in 2014, according to the CDC. Seventy-eight Americans die each day from an opioid overdose.

“The public doesn’t fully appreciate the scope of the problem,” President Barack Obama said Tuesday at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta.

The Obama administration announced a series of initiatives on Tuesday in order to expand addiction treatment.

“Addictions may be different for different people,” he said . “What we do know is there are steps that can be taken to get through addiction and get to the other side, and that is under-resourced.”

CNN contributed to this report.

38.47467 -121.354163