Inside Fentanyl’s Mounting Death Toll: ‘This Is Poison’
The New York Times
While a rise in overdose deaths shows the devastating consequences of the opioid’s spread, less is understood about how the drug has proliferated.
Dark heroin cut with so much white powdered fentanyl that it’s known on the street as “gray.” Cocaine laced so frequently with fentanyl that club DJs stock anti-overdose medication. Fake prescription pain pills that are in fact all fentanyl.
The synthetic opioid fentanyl, a legal prescription pain medication, is now a black market commodity blasting through the street drug marketplace. Cheap and up to 100 times more powerful than naturally derived opioids, it is also lethal.
Behind the trend is a growing body count: In the 12-month period that ended in April, more than 100,000 Americans, a record number, died from overdoses, according to preliminary data from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of the deaths were linked to synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
