Fentanyl has caused a large increase in opioid related drug overdoses. In today's podcast we discuss fentanyl's history, uses, why drug dealers love it, and the dangers it poses.

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Today our topic is:

Fentanyl: When straight heroin just isn’t enough

In the past couple of years, there has been a significant

rise in the number of opiate-related overdoses. 

Opiates like heroin are nothing new, they have been used by mankind for

thousands of years.  As a pain-reliever,

it is difficult to match.  However, the

addiction associated with opiates has always been an unfortunate

side-effect.  This addiction often leads

to death by overdose as addicts continually chase a better high.

In the US, from 2016-2017, opiate overdoses increased by 47%

primarily due to the synthetic opioids. 

That’s an additional 24,000+ deaths a year due to man-made opiate-like

drugs.  These drugs have names like fentanyl,

acetylfentanyl, acrylfentanyl, carfentanil, furanylfentanyl, and U-47700.  In this podcast, we are going to refer to all

of these substances as fentanyl.

History of fentanyl

Fentanyl was invented in 1959 by Belgian physician Paul

Janssen.  He synthesized a

chemical similar to morphine, but slightly different.  It had a couple of medical advantages over

morphine.  It acted faster and was much

stronger.    https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/757089868/fentanyl-as-a-dark-web-profit-center-from-chinese-labs-to-u-s-streets

In fact, fentanyl is 50-100 times more potent than morphine.

This means you don’t have to use nearly as much to treat the same amount of

pain.  https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/opioids/fentanyl.html  As we mentioned, there are different flavors

of fentanyl, over 30 different unique compounds so far.  These different compounds have vastly

different strengths.  For instance,

carfentanyl is estimated to be 10,000 times more potent than morphine. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/fentanyl.html

The normal IV fentanyl dose is ~ 120 ug which is roughly equal to 2 grains of

salt.  The lethal dose of fentanyl for a

normal adult is as low as 2mg (equal to about 32 grains of salt).  That’s not a lot.

Now let’s look at carfentanil.  Its’ normal use is as a large animal

tranquilizer.  Like elephant large.  It takes about 10 mg to sedate an elephant.

The lethal dose for a human is ~20ug. 

Keep in mind that a single grain of salt is ~ 60ug, so a single grain of

carfentanyl contains 3 lethal doses. 

Needless to say, this is pretty toxic stuff. 

Fentanyl as an illicit drug

As with any other legitimate medication, as soon as it

enters common use, someone will find a way to abuse it.  One of the first people to profit from

fentanyl was a self-taught chemist from Wichita, Kansas, named George

Marquardt.  Not only did he figure out