Fentanyl has potentially deadly consequences, especially for drug users

The Opioid Crisis has caused problems for families in communities from coast to coast.

Opioid addiction doesn’t discriminate and can affect people from all races, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

It often starts with a painkiller prescription, according to Dr. Harry Duran of the Las Vegas Recovery Center. From there, users often move on to using heroin because the pills become too expensive.

In this day and age, he explained, it can be incredibly dangerous to have an addiction to drugs, because of the prevalence of Fentanyl.

“Buying supposed Opioids or heroin off the black market that could contain Fentanyl, it’s very easy to overdose, in this day and age,” Duran said. “Suppliers are mixing in Fentanyl, or Fentanyl derivatives, into the heroin or into counterfeit oxycodone type pills.”

That’s a serious risk, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary.

The presence of fentanyl-containing counterfeit pills in an area is increasingly associated with spikes in overdose deaths. Fentanyl traffickers use fentanyl powder and pill presses to produce pills that resemble popular prescription opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone.

The DEA’s report continues to say,

It is highly likely many distributors do not know what exactly they are selling when it comes to differentiating between heroin, fentanyl, and fentanyl-laced heroin, as well as differentiating between diverted pills and fentanyl-containing counterfeit pills. This probably means many distributors are not intentionally deceiving customers; instead, suppliers do not always inform distributors specifically what substances or combinations of substances they are selling.

However, the DEA does write that some distributors are there doing this on purpose:

Other distributors actively cut heroin with fentanyl to extend their heroin supply; however, it is often unclear whether customers in these cases are aware of how/if their heroin has been cut.

Just trace amounts of the drug can be deadly.