Apparently, fentanyl isn’t the worst thing out there anymore. It’s carfentanil. Fentanyl, as you might know, is a powerful painkilling drug that is 100 times more powerful than morphine. Some doctors and medical groups recommend prescribing fentanyl only in cases of extreme pain, such as people dying of cancer.
Carfentanil is even stronger than both those drugs. How strong? Well, it’s 100 times more powerful than fentanyl. If you’re doing the math at home, that makes carfentanil 10,000 times more powerful than morphine.
Morphine, as you know, is nothing to take lightly. Plenty of people of people have become hooked on this painkilling drug and struggle with physical and mental symptoms of such addictions. But a drug that’s 10,000 times times more potent than morphine? That’s just scary.
Carfentanil is medication that calms large animals, which is why veterinarians use it as an elephant tranquilizer. Adult male African elephants can weigh anywhere from 5,000 to 14,000 pounds. The average adult male weighs around 195 pounds and the average American female around 166 pounds, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
People who use carfentanil are thus using medications created for creatures much, much heavier and much bigger than they are. It’s little wonder that people are overdosing from the drug.
Unlike fentanyl, regulatory agencies have not approved the drug for human use, so carfentanil is an illicit (illegal) drug. People typically take carfentanil combined with other illicit drugs, such as heroin. This type of use is reminiscent of the way people combine heroin with fentanyl or use other drug cocktails.
Sometimes people don’t even know that they’re ingesting such cocktails. They could be buying a substance that they think is just heroin, so they might take their usual amount. If this substance has been laced with fentanyl or carfentanil, these users could be using much stronger drugs than they anticipated, leading to overdoses or even death.
The dangers of carfentanil, fentanyl, heroin, and other illicit drugs illustrate the need for effective addiction treatment. Just as importantly, they should prompt policymakers and others to create tactics to prevent the manufacture and sales of such drugs in the first place.
