By German Lopez
December 21, 2017
Source: VOX
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
Fentanyl and its analogs are appearing across America, making the US’s deadliest drug overdose crisis ever even worse.
The leading cause of drug overdoses in America is no longer cocaine, meth, or even heroin or common opioid painkillers like Percocet and OxyContin. It’s synthetic opioids like fentanyl and its analogs.
Fentanyl has made America’s opioid epidemic, already the deadliest drug overdose crisis in US history, even deadlier. In 2015, more than 52,000 people died of drug overdoses; in 2016, the total rose to nearly 64,000. A spike in fentanyl overdose deaths was a huge contributor: Overdose deaths linked to non-methadone synthetic opioids like fentanyl jumped from nearly 10,000 in 2015 to more than 19,000 in 2016 — surpassing common opioid painkillers and heroin for the first time.
So what exactly is fentanyl? And why is this drug, which has been around as medicine for decades, popping up as a big cause of death now?
The short answer is that as people who use drugs have moved from opioid painkillers to seek out more potent, cheaper drugs, there has been a destructive race to find the most affordable high. Fentanyl, as a drug that’s relatively easy to produce for a better, cheaper high per dose than heroin, has become the natural destination for traffickers and users who want the strongest products.
This also offers a stark warning about the opioid epidemic: When it comes to cracking down on opioids, just going after the drug’s supply isn’t enough. If you go after opioid painkillers, people will eventually go to heroin. If you go after heroin, they’ll eventually go to fentanyl. And if you go after fentanyl, they might resort to some of its analogs, like carfentanil. This drug crisis, then, likely requires a response that also tackles the existing demand for these drugs, particularly through new forms of drug prevention and treatment that can get people off these dangerous substances altogether.
To understand that let’s first pull back to what fentanyl and its analogs are, where they came from, and what they can teach us about the opioid epidemic’s trajectory.
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