PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A synthetic opioid that is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more powerful than fentanyl is increasingly showing up in Philadelphia street drugs, raising the risk of fatal overdoses.
The drug, called carfentanil, was developed to sedate elephants and is not approved for human use. Yet Dr. Daniel Teixeira da Silva, director of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction, said the city has seen a 70-fold increase in carfentanil in the street drugs tested in the last few months.
“In the first half of this year, we detected it in one drug sample in more than 300. Now, we’re detecting it in 20% of the dope samples that we’re testing,” he said. “This is the strongest opioid in the drug supply, so [it is] very worrisome.”
A fatal dose of carfentanil could fit on a pencil point. It was suspected in two fatal overdoses back in 2017 but was rarely seen in the city until this summer.
In the last decade or so, Philadelphia street drugs have gone from mostly heroin to a toxic stew of painkillers, tranquilizers, stimulants and synthetic opioids, each new addition bringing more consequences and overdose deaths. They include drugs like xylazine, which causes gaping wounds, and metetomadine, which intensifies withdrawal.
Unlike those drugs, though, da Silva said carfentanil’s effects can be reversed with Narcan.
“So there’s something that you can do if you’re concerned about someone having an overdose due to carfentanil,” he said.
However, if metetomadine is also a factor, da Silva said an overdose victim may start breathing again but not wake up from the sedation, and at this time of year, that brings a risk of hypothermia.