Fentanyl has even been used as a weapon. The U.S. military spent a decade tinkering with an aerosol version of the narcotic, trying to create an incapacitating spray. And it is believed to have been the active ingredient in the gas that Russian commandos used in 2002 to knock out Chechen terrorists who were holding 750 people in a Moscow theatre, fatally poisoning 117 hostages in the process.
To date, the biggest cluster of fentanyl deaths came between 2005 and 2007, in and around Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, with 1,013 confirmed fatal overdoses. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency eventually traced their source back to a single clandestine laboratory outside Mexico City, run by a Breaking Bad-style chemist nicknamed “El Cerebro” (the Brain). The powder he made was exported to the States, then cut into heroin and distributed by a Chicago drug gang known as the Mickey Cobras. Users understood that the hybrid smack was potent and extremely dangerous, and that was a big part of the attraction. On the street, it went by names such as Suicide Mission, Code Blue, Reaper and Lethal Injection. It disappeared after the Mexican lab was shut down and the Brain and 47 Cobras were arrested.
The illicit fentanyl that’s currently flooding Canadian markets in pill form has more benign nicknames: greenies, green beans and green monsters (all references to its emerald hue). But that doesn’t make it any less deadly. Stamped as OxyContin, the fentanyl has been retailing for as little as $10 a pill—an indication of how cheap it is to manufacture, and how easy it is to obtain the raw material. The big B.C. investigation in March turned up two industrial pill presses that were used to make the 29,000 tablets. Two of the 14 people arrested in associated raids in Alberta and Saskatchewan are “full-patch” members of the Hells Angels. A third man is the president of an affiliated motorcycle gang, the Fallen Saints.
Shutting down the “fake Oxy” trade won’t be simple, however. This time, there seem to be multiple sources for the fentanyl. Police have suggested that Mexican drug cartels are involved in its importation, but that it’s being manufactured even farther afield, in places such as Turkey and China. It can even be ordered online. “Companies guarantee delivery, even if it’s seized by the Canadian Border Services Agency,” Staff Sgt. Martin Schiavetta, of the Calgary police drug unit, said in a recent interview with the CBC. In fact, so much of the raw powder is now coming into the country that Canadian dealers are said to be exporting their excess product to the northwest United States.
Then there’s the other problem: the growing abuse of the legitimate pharmaceutical version of the drug. Prescriptions for high-dose painkillers have skyrocketed over the last 15 years. A study by a group of Ontario researchers, published last fall in Canadian Family Physician, crunched six years of drug data and determined that Canadians are now the world’s biggest per capita consumers of legal opioids, with more than 30 million high-dose tablets and patches distributed every year. (Statistics Canada estimates that one in 10 Canadians suffers from chronic pain.) “Clinicians haven’t been given a lot of guidance on how to deal with long-term pain,” says Tara Gomes, scientific lead for the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network and one of the authors. “There is a place—a really specific place—in therapy for these drugs, when people have horrible, intractable pain. But not when they have a sore knee from golf.”
http://www.macleans.ca/society/health/fentanyl-the-king-of-all-opiates-and-a-killer-drug-crisis/
