The fentanyl crisis isn’t going away anytime soon, if ever.
At least not until fentanyl is replaced by an even stronger drug and society has a new crisis to deal with.
There is no doubt that opioids, which include the strongest pain relievers available, are a blessing for many people.
Morphine was used for many years for people suffering from severe pain, though cautiously because of the high potential for addiction, which still happened, in the hospitals and on the street. But as the opioid class of pain relievers became stronger — OxyContin leading up to fentanyl — they seem to have become more freely available and the cause of more deaths and social disruption.
It’s hard to imagine someone developing a pain reliever stronger than fentanyl, except then there is Carfentanil — an animal tranquilizer never intended for human consumption — which can kill with a dose smaller than a snowflake.
That sounds like something it would be pretty hard not to overdose on. It’s 1,000 times stronger than fentanyl, or about 10,000 times stronger than morphine. It’s usually used to subdue elephants, but still, heroin laced with Carfentanil has been linked to overdoses and deaths.
Expect the overdose crisis to get a lot worse when Carfentanil starts being mass-produced in illegal laboratories.w
Time, education and police resources may help combat the problem, but as we’ve seen over the decades with morphine addiction and all the other “recreational” drugs, no one has found a way to end this crisis.
We don’t want to sound like there is no hope. There are a great many people — scientists, police, governments all the way down to the people working on the front lines — doing their best to help, and their ongoing dedication deserves to be honoured.
But until society gets a handle on, not the drugs themselves, but the desire for the easy thrills and escapism they offer, we will just continue to add to the list of problem drugs. We may not know what drug will be at the centre of the next crisis, but it seems sure there will be one.