https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/killer-opioid-fentanyl-could-be-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction
(Bloomberg) -- It would take only 118 pounds of fentanyl to kill 25 million people.
That’s how much of the powerful opioid painkiller Nebraska State Trooper Sam Mortensen found in April when he stopped a truck marked “U.S. Mail” swerving onto the shoulder along Interstate 80.
Rolling up the trailer door revealed an empty hold. But just below a refrigeration unit, behind a plastic panel secured with mismatched bolts, Mortensen found 42 brick-shaped packages, weighing 54 kilograms, full of fentanyl. The drug is so potent that even a small amount — the equivalent of a few grains of salt — can be lethal.
“Is that even believable? Can you even imagine?,” President Donald Trump said in October when Mortensen was honored at the White House for making one of the largest fentanyl seizures in U.S. history. The truck’s two drivers were arrested. “Trooper Mortensen, that was a job well done.”
Fentanyl has emerged as the most dangerous of a group of drugs blamed for creating a U.S. public health crisis. American deaths linked to fentanyl grew more than 50 percent to 29,406 last year, from 19,413 in 2016, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Relatively easy to manufacture, the drug is turning up more on the streets as dealers strive to meet still-enormous demand for opioids in the U.S.
Fentanyl is ever-evolving as suppliers try to avoid detection and still boost the potency of the drug using what are called analogues — essentially chemical cousins.
“There’s never been a drug like fentanyl before,” said Josh Bloom, senior director of chemical and pharmaceutical research at the American Council on Science and Health. “For street drugs, this absolutely destroys anything else in terms of lethality and danger.”
Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin, with which it is often mixed. In its strongest form, called carfentanil, it is used legally as an elephant tranquilizer. Law enforcement officers and first responders have been warned to handle fentanyl with extreme caution; some have fallen seriously ill after getting it on their skin or clothing.
