Author: Steven Reinberg / Source: CBS News
As the U.S. opioid epidemic grinds on, fentanyl is fast becoming the main culprit in drug overdose deaths, health officials report.
Cocaine and heroin remain the street drugs of choice, but more overdose deaths involve fentanyl, either mixed with those narcotics or taken alone.
Between 2013 and 2016, overdose deaths involving fentanyl increased about 113 percent per year, researchers found.“The drugs most frequently involved in overdose deaths change quickly from one year to the next,” said lead researcher Dr. Holly Hedegaard, a medical epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Many of these deaths involve more than one drug, Hedegaard said. “A lot of the deaths that mention fentanyl also mention heroin, and a lot of the deaths that mention cocaine also mention fentanyl,” she explained.
Over the past several years, heroin and cocaine mixed with fentanyl have become more common, which may account for the combination of drugs seen on death certificates. But that isn’t something the researchers could tell from death certificates, Hedegaard said.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 80 to 100 times stronger than heroin or cocaine, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Fentanyl was first developed to relieve pain in cancer patients.
But according to the DEA, fentanyl is added to heroin to increase its potency, or is disguised as highly potent heroin. Although many drug users think they are buying heroin, they don’t know they’re buying fentanyl….
The post Fentanyl overtakes heroin as the No. 1 opioid overdose killer appeared first on FeedBox.