Fentanyl—The Deadliest Opioid Painkiller Hidden in Plain Sight

In 2015, the average, American life expectancy dropped. This was the first time the life expectancy went down since 1993. In 2016, it dropped again. This was the first time the U.S. average life expectancy dropped for two years in a row since 1965. Alarming indeed, especially considering the fact that our nation is making improvements in the usual, top causes of death like cancer, diabetes, and obesity.

At the forefront of the opiate epidemic is one drug that kills more people than all other opiate painkillers. This is fentanyl, the lethal opiate pain reliever, the culprit of mass overdose for several years running, and the most deadly drug in use in the United States today.

The Risk of Taking Fentanyl

Fentanyl is a high-strength, fast-acting opiate pain reliever drug, designed to relieve severe and acute pain in patients. The drug is also used to treat chronic pain in long-term pain patients. Fentanyl is similar to morphine in its basic, chemical composition, yet fentanyl is a far more potent opioid. Fentanyl is about one-hundred times more potent than morphine, and about fifty times more potent than pure heroin. Though fentanyl is supposed to be tightly controlled due to its high strength and potency, it is relatively easy to manufacture on the street. It is also fairly easy to order it online, and it is quite easy to get a doctor to prescribe it. In fact, illegal drug labs in China now produce the majority of the fentanyl that is abused in the United States. If an addict can't get the drug locally, they can buy it on the “Dark Web” from a Chinese drug lab and have it shipped over illegally.

The death toll from fentanyl and other opiates have increased by more than four-hundred percent since the turn of the century. The death toll increased by seventy-five percent just between 2014 and 2015. This is a cataclysmic problem, and it all comes down to poor souls being prescribed high-strength opiates, becoming addicted to said opiates, self-medicating on said opiates, then overdosing and dying on said opiates. Since fentanyl has become so popular on the street, a lot of times addicts will overdose and die because they take heroin or some other opiate, not knowing that fentanyl has been laced into the product.

Controversy Behind Fentanyl

There is a lot of controversy regarding fentanyl, and one can imagine why. Fentanyl overdoses alone killed more than twenty-thousand Americans in 2016, which was a third of the total deaths from all drugs combined that year.

But the real controversy abounding fentanyl is born out of the shady changes in how this drug was supposed to be used, versus how it is used now. Fentanyl was first made years ago for the treatment of cancer patients only. Since then, the drug has escaped the area of medicine governing cancer treatment and is now used for other medical approaches. Unfortunately, many patients who are given fentanyl become dependent upon it.

Fentanyl was and is a mistake. There are answers for people who suffer from pain that do not lead to addiction and death. We just have to support them and insist upon them.

Sources:

• https://www.usnews.com/opinion/policy-dose/articles/2017-01-25/fentanyl-is-the-latest-opioid-threat-to-our-health
• https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/nyregion/fentanyl-epidemic-long-island.html?_r=0&mtrref=www.usnews.com&gwh=529BAE80EAA93FE1FEC0C7F109ADD675&gwt=pay
• https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/fentanyl