These questions and answers are more important than any Final Jeopardy round. This article, "Short Answers to Hard Questions About the Opioid Crisis" by Josh Katz presents eleven questions and answers that everyone needs to read. The following excerpt is question 7. The others are just as important.
Read all the questions and answers.
What is fentanyl and why is it killing people?
It’s a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin.
Heroin is derived from opium, a plant. That means its growers need fields and labor to harvest the crop. They are tied to land, weather and time.
Fentanyl is purely synthetic. Think chemistry, not agriculture. It’s commonly used for surgical anesthesia and is prescribed to treat pain, but almost all of the fentanyl on the streets is illicitly manufactured. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the majority of illicit fentanyl in the United States is manufactured either in China or in Mexico using precursors bought from China. And at least some portion of it comes to the United States in the mail, ordered from dark web sources like the recently shuttered AlphaBay. But we don’t know how much.
