FENTANYL

Click a button below for factual, bias-free information on fentanyl.

What is it?

How does it work?

What are the risks?

How to stay safe

Resources

What is it

Fentanyl is an opioid drug that acts upon the opioid receptors in the brain.

A few things that can be important to know include the facts that:

Fentanyl is approximately 50 times more potent than heroin and produces more immediate yet shorter lasting effects.

When opioid receptors are activated in our nervous system, our breathing slows.

With opioids as intense as fentanyl, it doesn’t often take much to depress our breathing to dangerously low rates or to stop our breathing entirely – what we call an opioid overdose.

When we talk about fentanyl, we can be referring to:

Pharmaceutical fentanyl that has been prescribed safely and effectively for severe pain for over 50 years, and is among the most commonly used pain management drugs during childbirth;

Illicitly manufactured synthetic opioids made and sold outside of the controls and safety of the pharmaceutical market – often referred to as street drugs or illegal drugs. These can be similar to pharmaceutical fentanyl, but vary in many ways due to the unregulated nature of the illicit market where ensuring quality, dosage, and safety are more difficult.

The most reliable way to distinguish between a prescription and an illicitly manufactured drug is to find the source. Even if it’s a pill, if you can’t guarantee it came from a pharmacy, caution is critical.

What Does the Data Tell Us?

Currently, about 70% of overdose deaths each year involve a synthetic opioid.

Drug overdose death rates are highest for adults between the ages of 35 and 44 years old, with the 24-34 year old age group following closely behind. In addition to these deaths, there are approximately 17,000 prescription opioid-related deaths and 9,000 heroin related overdose deaths annually.

In today’s drug market, it’s important to understand that most overdoses involve a mixture of drugs, often taken together within what appears to be a single product like a pill or powder.

As fentanyl has largely saturated the drug market, all of these influences have now contributed to a situation where individuals don’t know about fentanyl, can’t tell which drugs do or don’t have fentanyl, or have a lack of alternatives that don’t contain fentanyl at all.

As a result, over 70% of the more than 100,000 overdose deaths annually in the United States involve a synthetic opioid — but it doesn’t have to be this way.

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How does it work

Fentanyl works by binding to opioid receptors in the brain. While fentanyl works similarly to substances like heroin and morphine, it is significantly more potent (50-100x) and therefore use has a greater chance of resulting in overdose. Fentanyl differs from other opioids because its effects are felt more quickly. These effects also wear off much faster than other commonly used opioids.

Fentanyl binds to receptors in your brain that are meant to send signals to the rest of your body to tell it to keep breathing. Opioids like fentanyl interrupt these signal

When you take too many opioids, the signals slow down or stop, which means your breathing eventually stops.

With opioids as intense as fentanyl, it doesn’t often take much to depress our breathing to dangerously low rates or to stop our breathing entirely – what we call an opioid overdose.

When our bodies do not get adequate oxygen, other vital organ functions, like heart rate, slow and eventually stop as well.

What are the risks

Mixing fentanyl with other drugs increases the risk of an overdose. This can be explained by the ways that drugs interact, increase effects of one another, and overwhelm the brain and body’s ability to process each substance.

Most overdoses involve a mixture of drugs

Sometimes people may not know that they are taking a mixture, as it appears to be a single product within a pill or powder.

Some people take fentanyl along with stimulants in order to offset the sedative effect, or mistakenly believe it will prevent overdose. Stimulants cannot reverse opioid overdoses. Mixing drugs in this way actually puts someone at risk of an overdose because it is more likely that too much fentanyl is consumed to get the desired effect.

For people experimenting with drugs without ever having established a tolerance, or who have lost their tolerance, the on-ramp can be a dangerous place with a very narrow window of safety.