US authorities seized more fentanyl than enough to kill the entire American population in 2022, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) said on Tuesday, recalling the deadly danger posed by this synthetic opiate.
The DEA said it seized 50.6 million counterfeit pills containing fentanyl and 4.5 tons of fentanyl powder this year. He estimated that this equated to “more than 379 million hazardous doses”.
Fentanyl, which accounted for only a small fraction of overdose deaths a decade ago, is now ‘the nation’s worst drug threat,’ the agency said.
“It’s a synthetic opiate that’s 50 times more potent than heroin. Two milligrams of fentanyl, a small amount that fits in the tip of a penicillin, is considered a life-threatening dose,” he said.
According to official data, it was the leading cause of more than 107,000 overdose deaths in the United States from July 2021 to June 2022.
Cheap and relatively easy to produce, fentanyl has replaced prescription opiates and heroin in the illicit drug market.
According to the DEA, the main suppliers of fentanyl to the United States are the Mexican cartels of Sinaloa and Jalisco.
Their fentanyl is made in Mexico with chemicals “mostly from China.”
According to the same source, some are distributed in the form of counterfeit drugs such as Percocet, OxyContin and Xanax.
About 60% of counterfeit fentanyl prescriptions tested by the DEA contained lethal levels of fentanyl.
