Officials seized more than 115 million pills containing fentanyl in 2023. The opiate is often mixed with street drugs and linked to overdoses.

Counterfeit fentanyl pills are being seized by law enforcement in the United States at an unprecedented rate. A study published May 13, 2024, in the International Journal of Drug Policy indicated that more than 115 million pills containing illicit fentanyl were seized by US law enforcement in 2023.

The researchers behind the study said the number had grown from 71 million pills in 2022 and 50,000 pills in 2017.

The counterfeit fentanyl pills are made to look like legal prescription opioid medication — such as oxycodone and tramadol — but are often far deadlier than the originals.

“Fentanyl in pill form is now beginning to dominate the drug supply [in the US]. Pills are easy to ship and disguise and can also be marketed easily, as Americans have a reputation of loving their pills,” said the study’s lead author Joseph Palamar of NYU Langone Health in the US.

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Fuck Nixon for coining that phrase. You can’t mitigate drug use with constraint. Addicts find a way. It’s mitigated with rehabilitative treatment. For those who claim that rehab doesn’t stick, I’d like to see how incarceration does.

  • skeptomatic@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Anybody watching back the hit TV series, E.R., observe how earlier in the series during an emergency the docs would ask the nurses for administration of “Oxy” and “Hydro” and later in the series they would ask for “Fent”.
    Street names.
    Tell me the producers of those drugs did not pay off the producers of the show to fit that in.
    Highly addictive drug product placement.
    Unreal.