Fentanyl Facts: What You Should Know and How to Stay Safe
By Peg Rosen
There’s a lot of talk about fentanyl these days.
People are talking for a reason: The cheap, super-strong opioid is contaminating drugs and playing a major role in drug overdoses and overdose deaths.
The danger is real, but there’s also a lot of misinformation out there. The best way to protect yourself is to know the facts, understand your risks, and — if you or someone you care about uses drugs — have the tools and knowledge you need to stay as safe as possible.
Here’s what to know.
Fentanyl Is an Opioid
Opioids are a family of drugs that are made from or mimic natural substances found in the opium poppy plant. The drugs produce a range of effects, including extreme happiness, relaxation, and pain relief. When you use opioids for an extended time, your brain gets used to them. If you stop using, your body can go through painful physical and psychological symptoms of withdrawal.
Fentanyl is what’s known as a synthetic opioid. It’s created in a lab and acts on the same brain receptors as natural opioids. It is odorless and tasteless, and it can be delivered in many forms, including by mouth, under the tongue, by snorting, by smoking, or by injecting. Pharmaceutical fentanyl is used medically, mostly on patients after surgery and to ease the pain of cancer. But the fentanyl you hear most about these days is made illegally and is going into street drugs, including opioids and other types of drugs. Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin.
Fentanyl Is a Threat Even If You Don’t Use Opioids
Some people deliberately use fentanyl because it’s cheap and extremely potent, but most get exposed because the drugs they’re using aren’t what they think they are.
Drug traffickers often mix a tiny bit of fentanyl into other opioids and pass them off as prescription painkillers and heroin. They do the same with other street drugs, such as cocaine and ecstasy. Perhaps most commonly, fentanyl is pressed into fake pills that contain little, if any, of the drugs people think they are getting. With the same coloring and markings, you can’t tell the difference between them and the drugs they are supposed to be, such as Adderall, Xanax, and other legitimate pharmaceuticals.
Buyers who don’t die of fentanyl poisoning keep coming back for more because they become addicted. The danger: You may never intend to use fentanyl, but you can become addicted if fentanyl is in the drugs you use.
The Risk of Fentanyl Isn’t Overblown
Not every street drug is contaminated with fentanyl, and not everyone who takes fentanyl-laced drugs overdoses and dies. A lot depends on who’s making the drugs, what batch you get, how much you take, and what your tolerance is. Still, the facts are pretty scary.
- Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal. That lethal dose is smaller than the tip of a pencil.
- Six out of 10 pills containing fentanyl have at least 2 milligrams of the drug, a potentially deadly dose. Some pills tested have as much as 5.1 milligrams of fentanyl.
- Over 150 people die every day from overdosing on synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
- In 2021, more than 107,000 Americans died from drug poisoning, and 66% of those deaths involved synthetic opioids (mainly fentanyl).
From 2019 to 2020, overdose deaths increased by 94% among teens 14 to 18 years old. Illegal fentanyl played a role in the increase in fatal overdoses among teens.
Young, Inexperienced Drug Users Are Most at Risk
Research shows that overdose deaths are increasing among teens, due in part to fentanyl. Teens and young adults are less likely than older adults to have used opioids or other drugs before, and they can have limited information about drugs and how to decrease risk when using them.
It’s important to be aware of the risk so you can make well-informed decisions and practice strategies to keep yourself as safe as possible if you use drugs.
You May Not Be Able to Tell a Fentanyl High From Another Kind of High
When you’ve taken fentanyl, you may not be able to tell. It can be hard to differentiate between a fentanyl high and a high you experience from taking other drugs.
Technically, opioids are depressants. They slow your breathing and heart rate, and they can make you feel sleepy. But opioids can also cause you to feel extremely happy, and they can flush your body with a sense of warmth and pleasure. Those feelings could be confused with how you feel on other drugs, such as cocaine, Adderall, and ecstasy. Once someone is high, they often won’t be fixated on exactly what drug they took. They may just think about how good they feel.
Keep Yourself Safe by Assuming Street Drugs Contain Fentanyl
Fentanyl comes in both liquid and solid forms. It’s easy to mix into just about any liquid, powder, or pill. Whether you’re using coke or acid, illegally sold Adderall or Vicodin, don’t take any friend or dealer’s word for it that it’s clean.
No one regulates how illegal drugs are processed. No one can guarantee what’s in — or not in — them. Even if a dealer swears they’ve tested their drugs, stay vigilant. Assume the drug contains fentanyl and test it for yourself.
Edibles Can Contain Fentanyl
There are some stories about people overdosing after smoking fentanyl-laced weed, but few, if any, accounts have been proven true. The fact is that even if fentanyl was on weed, it would burn and break down before it could enter your lungs. It’s possible, however, for edibles to be tainted with fentanyl — or just about anything else. To play it safe, buy marijuana from a dispensary if you live in a state where it’s legal.
You Can’t Overdose by Touching Fentanyl
Contrary to online chatter, fentanyl isn’t easily absorbed through the skin unless it’s in a prescription fentanyl patch, and inhaling fentanyl that’s floating in the air isn’t a real risk. To have an effect, fentanyl must enter your body through your bloodstream or mucous membranes (your nose, eyes, mouth, vulva, anus).
Technically, fentanyl could enter your body through a cut on your skin or be transferred to your eye if you rub it with a hand that is contaminated, but those scenarios shouldn’t keep you up at night. They also shouldn’t scare you from helping someone who may be overdosing.
You Can Minimize Your Risk
If you or someone you care about plans to use or already uses opioids, there are steps you can take to lessen your risk of an overdose. The steps are known as harm-reduction strategies, or practices that limit the negative and sometimes lethal effects of using drugs. They include everything from using fentanyl test strips and carrying naloxone, an overdose-reversing medication, to using drugs only with other people.
Learn more about harm-reduction strategies, as well as how you might begin seeking treatment for opioid use disorders, with these resources:
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