Carfentanil is the latest Drug making the its way onto Canadian streets and into the hands of opiate dealers and users.  We are all familiar with headlines decrying increasing overdoses from heroine and fentanyl, which are also opiates.  So what makes Carfentanil so scary?  It’s a veterinary medicine, designed to tranquilize very large animals like moose and elephants.

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Carfentanil is 100 Times Stronger than fentanyl and 10,000 times stronger than morphine.  Veterinarians preparing to use it must rigorously protect themselves against it with a variety of protective equipment, since even getting it onto their skin or into their eyes could be dangerous.  And it takes, as the New York Times reported on September 9, a dose “smaller than the size of a snowflake” to kill a human being.

Dealers, once charged with possession and trafficking, are now being charged with murder.  Overdoses happen so easily, and sometimes even the medications that can revive an addict who has overdosed, such as Narcan, don’t work with carfentanil.  It is just too powerful.  If there were ever a time for opiate addicts to seek help, it is now.  The next purchase, the next high, really could be the last.

I saw, firsthand and up close, when I was in treatment, the utter misery of withdrawing from opiates.  I watched a fellow client, who became a friend, grow weaker by the day as his nausea prevented him from eating and drinking, watched him driven by ambulance to the hospital more than once, only to return after being given an IV that did little, if anything, to relieve his agony.  I watched  another client nearly climbing out of her own skin, frantic with withdrawal-induced itching.  I noticed a chunk of her hair in the garbage one morning, and could only presume she had yanked it out in her desperation.  She took off in the dark of night to purchase her drug of choice in a neighboring city, and was subsequently caught by the staff and discharged.  She was in too deep, too far gone to come back and stay there.

Because of this, I will not write a preachy paragraph full of platitudes about how life can be beautiful and withdrawal ends and better days are to come.  For an opiate addict in withdrawal, life is hell, and minutes last for days, and the ravages of addiction seem a rosy paradise in comparison to what they have to endure.   I can only say, only hope, that those contemplating getting deeper into their drug use, or experimenting with harder drugs, really understand what they are risking.  The next high might be all they are living for, but no drug is worth dying for.