(RNN) - Drug overdoses now kill more young Americans than anything else, the New York Times reported.
One reason is a new drug so deadly it's considered a weapon of mass destruction.
Its street name is serial killer.
Carfenatil, which mostly comes to the U.S. from China, has started its killing spree as an ingredient that dealers mix with heroin to increase profits. The synthetic opiate can be used legally by specialized veterinarians - one dose can drop a 10,000-pound elephant.
It was legal for any lab in China to manufacture with almost no supervision until a new law went into effect on March 1. Before then it was churned out by tens of thousands of illicit labs and sold to Americans on the dark web, delivered by the U.S. Post Office, the easiest way to avoid detection.
The Chinese government's regulation of the dangerous drug is a welcome development, but whether it will slow the flow of carfentanil, and its less-powerful but still deadly cousin fentanyl remains to be seen. More than 160,000 Chinese companies have for years made carfentinil with few restrictions, AP reported.
There's no telling how much of the drug is already in the U.S. and Canada, where it's also a growing problem.
One Chinese chemist said illegal manufacture and shipping of the drug would be easy.
Last year, Xu Loquin, who worked for Hangzhou Reward Technology, said her company could produce carfentanil to order, which was legal at the time. She said she's in in favor of restricting production of dangerous, synthetic opioids, But a ban on production would be hard to enforce because there is so little oversight to begin with, and carfentanil is not difficult to produce quickly in small quantities, she told AP.
“The government should impose very serious limits,” she said in October 2016, “but in reality, in China, it’s so difficult to control because if I produce one or two kilograms, how will anyone know?” she said.
“They cannot control you, so many products, so many labs.”
China is the source of most heroin and synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, which is only 50 times stronger than heroin, and which has caused thousands of deaths in the U.S., among them, actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman and music icon Prince.
There are known instances of the raw materials being shipped to Mexico, where they are converted into carfentanil in makeshift labs, then smuggled into the U.S.
Overdose deaths increasing uncontrollably
The Times conducted an exhaustive examination of state-by-state statistics and found that the surge in deaths from prescription painkillers, heroin, fentanyl and its many analogues caused between 58,000 and 65,000 deaths in 2016, making overdose the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50.
The Times is not the first news source or government agency to reach that conclusion - though the official Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report will not be ready until December because their strict methods of categorization slow down the process.
CDC statistics since 1999 show that prescription drug abuse is the leading killer among those who die from an overdose, but the number of heroin-related deaths has quadrupled since 2010, and from 2014 to 2015 deaths from synthetic opioids (excluding methadone) shot up from 5,500 to almost 9,600.
As tighter restrictions make prescription painkillers harder to get, many addicts have turned to heroin or bootleg pills that contain deadly ingredients.
Synthetic opioids usually come in the form of a white powder. They are indistinguishable from heroin, cocaine, meth and dozens of other street drugs, but they are far more deadly. They are pressed into pills that have the markings and coloration of prescription medications like Xanax, Oxycontin, Demerol and other painkillers. Anybody who takes a full strength counterfeit is highly likely to die - but if it is broken up and sold in bits, it could kill far more.
A single pill resembling a 30mg OxyContin tablet is enough to kill 60 people if it’s made of fentanyl, and possibly thousands if it’s carfentanil.
Carfentanil, fentanyl's most powerful analogue, is legally marketed to specialized veterinary practices under the brand name Wildnil, and is used to tranquilize elephants and other large animals. African elephants range from 5,000 to 14,000 pounds, and a dart full of carfentanil will bring them down in minutes. The average American man weighs 195.5, and if he touches or inhales an amount the size of a grain of salt, he could die, with or without medical intervention.
According to some reports, uncut carfentenil is an astonishing 5,000 times more powerful than heroin, which makes it a dream come true for drug-runners and dealers.One kilo of carfentenil, small enough to fit in a shoebox with room to spare, is the equivalent of 5 metric tons of heroin. That same kilo would cost between $8,000 and $25,000 according to a 2016 investigation by Fast Company.
On the street, Fast Company found, heroin sells for between $90 and $120 a gram. Adding carfentanil to heroin is a low-cost way to increase its value exponentially, and add the kick that addicts crave – provided it doesn’t kill them.
A speck of carfentanil that would fit inside Roosevelt’s ear on the dime is a fatal dose. Retail-level dealers don’t have the sort of precision scales to measure such tiny amounts, and they aren't all that careful, anyway.
When a dealer has a supply with a strong kick, word spreads by word of mouth in the community of addicts. Dealers can afford to kill a few customers who take too much or have a lower tolerance, and still attract enough new business to keep the cash flowing.
Carfentanil can become even more dangerous
Before the drug kingpins discovered carfentanil, it was sold for years over the internet as a weapon. It’s ideal for a single assassination, and terrifyingly suited to an attack on any enclosed area where people gather.
In 2002, Russian special forces broke a siege when they pumped carfentanil gas into a Moscow theater where Chechen rebels had held between 800 hostages for 57 hours. The narcotic knocked everyone unconscious and neutralized the rebels, but 120 hostages died, too.
A survivor recalled watching a plume descend in the theater. People knelt or got close to the ground, but eventually lost consciousness. She remembered somebody saying “She’s alive." Later, she woke up on a bus, still groggy and sick.
“It was such a horror just to look at it,” she said of the scene on the bus where the hostages were held. “Nobody was moving. They put the people there like dolls.”
She said she felt nauseated, and started to throw up for a long time after she was given tea after arriving at the hospital. She said the period of unconsciousness was like sleep without memory.
Last May, a police officer in East Liverpool, OH, collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital after he brushed a speck of fentanyl off his uniform. The drug entered his body through the skin on his hand and he quickly lost his faculties, then collapsed.
The officer had made a drug bust earlier in the day where the suspects spilled the powdered drug on the floorboards of their car, and it got into the air. It got all over the floor, their shoes and clothes. Though the arresting officer obeyed the protocol for collection of an unknown drug, a tiny crumb got on his uniform. Officer Chris Green was OK during the arrest because he wore gloves. But he wiped the speck of powder off with his bare hand.
He said he felt weird, becoming more and more detached from reality. He could hear his fellow officers talking but he could not respond. They recognized that he was suffering an overdose and called paramedics, who gave him a shot of Narcan, which reverses the effects of opioids, and rushed him to the hospital.
He was given more naxalone, the scientific name for Narcan, before he began to pull out of it. That's another effect of fentanyl and carfentanyl, it takes a lot more naxalone to neutralize the effects of overdose which has placed a financial burden on police forces to buy enough to deal with the exploding epidemic.
Green's chief was appalled to see with his own eyes how truly dangerous these drugs are.
"This is scary," East Liverpool Police Chief John Lane told CNN. "He could have walked out of the building and left and he could have passed out while he was driving. You don't even know it's there on his clothes.
"His wife, kids, and his dog could be confronted with it and boom, they're dead. This could never end," he said.
And this was fentanyl - 100 times weaker than carfentanil. It's easy to imagine either being used as a weapon that could kill hundreds of people in an instant, and create an environment where police and paramedics could not get to the victims to help without gearing up in full hazmat gear.
Carfentanil has been banned as a battlefield weapon for those very reasons. It would create chaos, and would kill all it touched indiscriminately. It would leave behind a toxic landscape that would be all but impossible to clean up.
"If you really think about it, these drugs could be used as weapons of mass destruction," East Liverpool Police Capt. Patrick Wright said. "All you have to do is walk into any room, flip it in the air, and people are going to start dropping out."
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