Call your doctor right away if you or your child have a rash, itching, hoarseness, trouble breathing, trouble swallowing, or any swelling of your hands, face, or mouth while you are using this medicine. Using this medicine with any of the following is usually not recommended, but may be unavoidable in some cases. If used together, your doctor may change the dose or how often you use this medicine, or give you special instructions about the use of food, alcohol, or tobacco. Appropriate studies performed to date have not demonstrated geriatric-specific problems that would limit the usefulness of fentanyl injection in the elderly. However, elderly patients are more likely to have age-related lung, kidney, liver, or heart problems, which may require caution and an adjustment in the dose for patients receiving fentanyl injection. Appropriate studies have not been performed on the relationship of age to the effects of fentanyl injection in children younger than 2 years of age.
Prevention Tips
The treatment of these mental disorders may help prevent fentanyl-related fatalities and achieve abstinence. Fentanyl is ~30–50 times more potent than heroin, and smaller volumes of heroin and other drugs that are adulterated with fentanyl can produce powerful effects with lower production costs. Detecting fentanyl and its analogs in used syringes can reveal exposure risk35.
What Does Street Fentanyl Look Like?
- NBC News did not go through with the purchase of the drug, but the Drug Enforcement Agency says mainland Chinese companies are known to manufacture and distribute fentanyl and other illegal drugs using e-commerce.
- In high enough doses, opioids can cause breathing to stop completely.
- Lofexidine, a central α2-adrenergic receptor agonist, was the first non-opioid medication that was approved by the United States FDA for the treatment of opioid withdrawal103,104.
- This medicine should also come with a Medication Guide and patient instructions.
This is likely not a new trend, and numerous vendors possibly also deal with other drug substances alongside fentanyl. Vendor clusters with Bitcoin payments to fentanyl suppliers have also been identified interacting with dark web marketplaces that have since gone offline, such as Silk Road and Hydra. ASAP Market is not the only dark web marketplace to – supposedly inadvertently – facilitate the fentanyl trade. The Investigator graph below shows that some vendors are active on a number of other dark markets, including Incognito, Vice City Market and World Market. This cluster of vendors receives fentanyl from a supplier based in Shanghai, China. This includes prescription or nonprescription (over-the-counter OTC) medicines and herbal or vitamin supplements.
Symptoms Of Overdose
He decided to seek out something that would be both safer and cheaper. For the past three years, he’s been buying fentanyl and its analogues, like carfentanil, online. When he receives it, he measures it out in water, which he says makes for greater accuracy. Now, for that amount, he can get enough fentanyl to last more than three weeks. Five or six times a day, a man from Texas injects a dose of carefully measured fentanyl.
Fentanyl Dealers Are Bypassing Dark Web Restrictions To Sell Deadly Precursors Online: Here’s How
This is why it is so important to administer naloxone as soon as possible. Some fentanyl analogs are legally manufactured for medical purpose like treating severe pain in humans and sedating animals. Others (such as illicitly manufactured carfentanil) are illegally produced for non-medical use.
Medical Uses
In 2024, the DEA seized more than fifty-five million fentanyl-laced, fake prescription pills, down from eighty million the previous year. The amount seized last year seizures was enough to equate to more than 367 million deadly doses. The crisis has become a scourge on the economy, a threat to national security, and a major foreign policy challenge. It’s one of the most common drugs involved in overdose deaths.
However, elderly patients are more likely to have drowsiness and age-related lung, kidney, liver, or heart problems, which may require caution and an adjustment in the dose for patients receiving fentanyl skin patch. Appropriate studies performed to date have not demonstrated pediatric-specific problems that would limit the usefulness of the Duragesic® patch and Fentanyl extended-release patch in children 2 years of age and older. However, pediatric patients must be opioid-tolerant before using a fentanyl patch. Safety and efficacy have not been established in children younger than 2 years of age. Fentanyl skin patch is also used to treat severe and persistent pain that requires an extended treatment period and when other pain medicines did not work well enough or cannot be tolerated. As Vox’s German Lopez previously explained, fentanyl has been around since the 1960s, but its illicit use has spiked in recent years.
KEEP YOUR HARM REDUCTION TOOLBOX STOCKED WITH NALOXONE
In the second decade of the 21st century in the United States, fentanyl was one of the deadliest drugs of abuse. According to preliminary data released by the CDC on August 13, 2025, an estimated 77,648 drug overdose deaths occurred in the 12 months ending in March 2025. This marks a 25% decrease compared to the same period ending in March 2024.
There’s no clear way to tell by sight, taste or smell that something has fentanyl. By testing their drugs, people can know what they’re taking and take steps to be safer, like getting Narcan. Fentanyl is often sold on its own in various forms, such as nasal spray, patch, powder, or pill. It is also added to other substances, making it easier for a drug user to get high on a smaller dosage of other opiates like heroin and cocaine. Postal Service because it searches for suspicious packages by hand, while services like FedEx and DHL use more rigorous, automated methods. The report recommends that all international packages start to include what they call “advanced electronic data”—special information on bar codes that could help flag drug-bearing packages for postal workers.
Accessibility Report
If you feel that the medicine is not working as well, do not use more than your prescribed dose. Your doctor may decrease your dose if you have sleep apnea (stop breathing for short periods during sleep) while using this medicine. Using this medicine with any of the following medicines is not recommended.
- He has advised numerous international organizations, public and private sector entities on emerging crime trends and prevention measures.
- This may help prevent worsening of your condition and reduce the possibility of withdrawal symptoms, such as abdominal or stomach cramps, anxiety, fever, nausea, runny nose, sweating, tremors, or trouble sleeping.
- Fentanyl is an extremely dangerous substance, and has been responsible for many fatal overdoses in the past several years.
- Place the sticky side of the used patch on the disposal unit and seal the entire package.
- It binds to opiate sensors in the brain and is highly addictive, whether taken as a prescription medication or procured on the street.
- Until recently, fentanyl was mostly only a problem on the East Coast.
Alternatively, contact us for more information or schedule a demo. The second implication is how these risks are assessed and uncovered. Regardless of how vendors try to conceal their fentanyl listings on the dark web, their activities can nevertheless be exposed through blockchain analytics. Our analysis has revealed that dark web vendors have purchased fentanyl to the tune of $0.5 million from dealers.
Fentanyl may cause some people to become drowsy, dizzy, or lightheaded, or to feel a false sense of well-being. Do not drive or do anything else that could be dangerous until you know how this medicine affects you. These effects usually go away after a few days of treatment, when your body gets used to the medicine. However, check with your doctor if drowsiness that is severe enough to interfere with your activities continues for more than a few days. Appropriate studies performed to date have not demonstrated geriatric-specific problems that would limit the usefulness of fentanyl skin patch in the elderly.
The Goals Of National Fentanyl Prevention And Awareness Day™ Are To:
It also exerts antidepressant and anxiolytic activity and is a promising treatment for neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome110. Repeated treatment with buprenorphine produced a greater magnitude of antinociceptive tolerance than higher-efficacy agonizts (e.g., morphine and etonitazene) in rats112. These data indicate that buprenorphine may have lower efficacy for the treatment of fentanyl overdose compared with heroin overdose, although no human trials have been performed to date116. In 2022, over 107,000 people died of a drug overdose, with 75% of those deaths involving an opioid. The overall rise in overdose deaths is largely attributable to the proliferation of illicit fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Illicit fentanyl is highly potent, cheaply made, and easily transported, making it extremely profitable.
Fentanyl is synthetic, which means it is made entirely in laboratories and has no natural ingredients. It was developed as a prescription medicine for treating severe pain, such as pain after surgery. When used as prescribed, it is also very effective in treating cancer pain or other types of severe chronic pain that don’t respond to other pain medicines.1,2,3 Read more about opioids on the NIDA website.
