Maybe I’m showing my age, but whenever we used to talk about needing pain medications, we would often talk about morphine. There were other drugs, then, of course, but morphine was the one that stuck in our minds.

Now, there are so many more drugs out there. Many of these drugs are so much more powerful than morphine. That blows my mind. Again, I could be showing my age, because it used to be that if someone needed morphine, they were in severe pain and in bad shape. Not just anyone could use morphine. You couldn’t use it for a regular headache, for example.

I think that this still holds true, at least. Morphine is not for a regular headache. But other drugs seem to have replaced morphine as a medically-prescribed medication and an abused recreational drug. Drugs like fentanyl, for example.

Did you know that fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine? I’ve probably said that in these blogs already, but it bears repeating. Carfentanil is 100 times more potent than fentanyl, so it might be 10,000 times more powerful than morphine. I’ve probably also discussed that, also, but those are some staggering numbers.

Morphine, fentanyl, and carfentanil are similar to each other. All three are also similar to heroin. In fact, many drug addicts might become hooked on prescriptions of morphine or fentanyl or another similar opioid (opioids are painkilling drug related to opium and also include hydrocodone, OxyContin, and other drugs). The users’ prescriptions might lapse, or the drugs might be too expensive for them. Seeking something similar, many of these addicts turn to something similar that is cheaper that doesn’t even require a doctor’s prescription: heroin.

Heroin’s bad enough, but dealers sometimes mix it with fentanyl and carfentanil, making the substance that much stronger and the risks of overdoses that much greater. These dangers point to the necessity of getting illegal drugs off the streets and providing more oversight for legal prescription drugs. After all, lives are at stake.