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Fentanyl Nation
Fatal drug overdoses have reached the highest benchmark in U.S. history.
When the New England Journal of Medicine published findings in March of 2022 indicating drug-overdose fatalities had reached their highest recorded level, it wasn’t news to everyone.
For millions of families, the terrible scale of the U.S. fentanyl crisis was already all too clear.
“In March 2022, 12-month drug-overdose fatalities reached their highest recorded level in the United States, with an estimated 110,360 deaths,” wrote the New England Journal of Medicine on July 6, 2023.
Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid drug that is primarily used for pain management and even anesthesia. It is currently classified as a controlled substance due to its high potential for abuse and addiction. Fentanyl is estimated to be about 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and significantly more powerful than other commonly prescribed opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone.
How Did We Get Here?
The history of the U.S. fentanyl crisis is the old familiar tragedy of “a little at a time, then all at once.”
Originally developed for medical use in the 1960s, fentanyl works by binding to opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord, resulting in pain relief and sedation.