The DEA claims they have already confiscated enough fentanyl this year to kill every American.
There are only two weeks left in the calendar year 2022. Still, the DEA said in a press statement on Tuesday that it had confiscated more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder and 50,6 million counterfeit prescription tablets laced with fentanyl. So far this year, more than 379 million fatal doses of fentanyl have been produced; that is more than enough to kill every person in the United States. According to the Census Bureau, 333,000,000 people are living in the USA.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s administrator, Anne Milgram, praised the agency’s agents for “relentlessly working” to remove “almost 379 million lethal doses of fentanyl” from American neighborhoods over the previous year. Amounting enough fentanyl to kill every American, these seizures demonstrate the DEA’s unyielding dedication to protecting Americans and saving lives by relentlessly pursuing those responsible for trafficking fentanyl across the country. For the DEA, stopping the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) Cartels in Mexico, which produce much of the fentanyl that is killing Americans, is a critical operational priority.
The press statement claims that the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels get most of the raw components for the fentanyl they traffic from China and then mass manufacture it in covert Mexican plants. Much of it is made to resemble well-known recreational prescription medicines like Xanax, Percocet, and OxyContin. It is common for counterfeit tablets to include only fentanyl and a harmless filler, yet these combinations can be fatal. They may be found easily on many social media platforms.
The DEA warned in a news statement that people should only take drugs prescribed to them by a doctor they know and trust and purchased from a registered pharmacy.
Six out of ten counterfeit tablets tested by DEA labs were found to contain a potentially fatal dosage of fentanyl. Comparatively, in 2021, just four of every ten tablets tested held a lethal dosage for the agency.
Fentanyl, 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine, is one of the most potent synthetic opioids, according to a news statement from the FDA earlier this year. Two milligrams of fentanyl is enough to kill an adult, just around 10–15 grains of salt. There is no way to know the fentanyl concentration of a given tablet or powder without doing extensive laboratory tests.
According to CDC data, overdose deaths among Americans reached a record high of more than 107,000 in 2021. According to The New York Times, most of these deaths (71,000) were caused by synthetic opioids. Furthermore, in December, the nonprofit advocacy organization Families Against Fentanyl tweeted that fentanyl was the biggest killer of Americans between 18 and 45.
The good news is that a vaccination created by scientists at the University of Houston has the potential to aid fentanyl users in recovering from their disease by protecting them against recurrence.
To do the study’s primary author, “our vaccination can develop anti-fentanyl antibodies that attach to the eaten fentanyl and block it from accessing the brain,” allowing it to be flushed out of the body via the kidneys. “This way, the person may avoid the high and ‘get back on the wagon’ to sobriety.”