China Ships Dangerous Drug to the United States
Recently, I was reading an article about a drug called fentanyl and the sad story about how it killed an 8-year-old child living in Detroit.
Fentanyl is no longer only used in cutting heroin. It’s in cocaine, it’s being mixed with meth, and some stories suggest that it’s even being mixed with marijuana. When a person decides to take illicit drugs, they have no clue where the drugs came from and how many other people have overdosed or died from using the same batch. As the drug crisis marches on, fentanyl is taking no prisoners.
A report released this year by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention is the latest to show how fentanyl is contributing to making the nation’s current drug epidemic the deadliest in U.S. history. Most of the 64,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths last year involved heroin or prescription painkillers such Percocet or Vicodin, all of which are opioids. About 56% of opioid deaths in the ten states studied in the report involved fentanyl. Fentanyl is an intensely powerful drug which makes it very easy to overdose. It’s ten to twenty times more powerful than pure heroin so even a little bit mixed into a batch of heroin can make that batch unexpectedly deadly.
As a medical drug, it is used to treat cancer pain and end-of-life pain. However, it is being increasingly sold illicitly and mixed with heroin by dealers because it is cheaper (CBS News).
China is believed to be a major source of illegal fentanyl and other similar drugs that are flooding the U.S. market. Last week, the Justice Department announced indictments of two alleged Chinese traffickers (CBS News).
The CDC report says fentanyl analogs—drugs from the same family that just possess tiny molecular differences—are also increasingly being detected in overdose deaths. These analogs, which are almost always illegal and are not approved for use in humans, include carfentanil, a drug used as a sedative for elephants, which is estimated to be about 10,000 times more potent than morphine. “Because of its extreme potency, even limited circulation of carfentanil could markedly increase the number of fatal overdoses,” the report warns.
The ten states included in the CDC analysis are Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The CDC analyzed these deaths and determined that of 5,152 opioid deaths in these states, fentanyl was present in more than 56% of the cases. Even more significant is the fact that even though multiple drugs may have been present in these cases, fentanyl was the cause of death in nearly every instance.
The toll was the heaviest in the Northeastern states and Missouri. In those states, fentanyl was involved in 60% to 90% of the deaths, while in other Midwest and Western states, the percentages ranged from 15% to 55%.
The CDC noted that opioid overdose deaths have quadrupled since 1999. It should not be a surprise that the number of opioid prescriptions has also quadrupled in that same time period.
The symptoms of fentanyl use are essentially the same as for other opioid drugs, including:
- Nausea and vomiting
- Itchiness
- Suppression of breathing
- Dry mouth
- Abdominal pain
- Constipation
- Euphoria
- Drowsiness
- Dizziness
- Insomnia
- Sweating
Here at Narconon Arrowhead, we have a humane way of helping a person through withdrawal and then taking them all the way to lasting sobriety. A person can safely and tolerably come off his drugs in the Withdrawal Unit at a Narconon rehab facility. Please contact us today and ask to speak with a treatment consultant for more information.
