Good Question: What is fentanyl?
CENTER CITY, Minn. – In September, law enforcement said they found brightly-colored, or "rainbow," fentanyl pills at a Mankato home where a shooting occurred.
Last week, Bloomington police announced the arrest of a man found with 108,000 fentanyl pills in a hotel room.
Fentanyl is being blamed for the rise in overdose cases in Minnesota and across the country over the last year. So, what is fentanyl? Good Question.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid manufactured in a laboratory that was first invented to help with pain control. It operates most similarly to morphine, but it far more powerful.
Legal fentanyl is made in FDA-approved labs and used in highly controlled medical settings in small doses.
Illegal fentanyl is usually the kind of drug connected to overdoses. According to the DEA, fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin.
"At treatment doses, fentanyl relieves pain," Dr. Sara Polley, Medical Director of National Youth Continuum for Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. "When it's used at a higher level, it creates a feeling of happiness, calm and peacefulness."
Dr. Polley says after marijuana and alcohol, opioids are the number three reason young people come in for treatment. And for those seeking opioid treatment, more than half are being treated for fentanyl use.
"Most people use it in pill form, and so what they do with the pill is often times snort the pill, like crush it and snort it," Polley said.
It can also be put into a liquid or oil form to inject, smoke or eat. Often, it's added to cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine – many times without the user knowing it.
"It increases something called dopamine in your brain which is the feel-good chemical and causes you to really crave it and want to keep using it," said Dr. Polley. "Really, fentanyl is particularly dangerous because of how strong it is."
Though experts believe fentanyl is driving higher overdose rates, not everyone overdoses on the drug. Some people have built up a tolerance over time. But, for those who haven't, a few granules of pure fentanyl can cause an overdose.
When someone overdoses, it means the drug has relaxed their body to the extreme. The breathing slows, the heart rate slows, then the brain starts to fail. When that happens, Naloxone, better known as Narcan, can push fentanyl out of the brain before it's too late.
"I also want people to know that addiction is a disease that impacts someone's brain," Dr. Polley said. "They're not doing that because they're a bad person or they want to do something wrong. They're doing that because their brain got attached to the substance because the substance was designed to have that happen, and they're really behaving out of a place of a disease, not who they really are."
