Author Ben Westhoff discusses his new book about how fentanyl was the drug nobody saw coming — until it became a scourge on North American streets.
Source: Fentanyl once thought too ‘risky’ to become a widely used drug, says author | CBC Radio
Nobody foresaw fentanyl’s impact on the illicit market because it was simply “so powerful,” says a journalist who has investigated how the drug became a deadly part of the opioid crisis.
“It’s 50 times stronger than heroin, and it only takes about two grains of rice worth to overdose and die,” said Ben Westhoff, author of Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic.
“Authorities just thought that people wouldn’t engage in such risky behaviour.”
But they hadn’t counted on fentanyl being discovered by long-term heroin users, he said. Sustained use meant that these drug users weren’t able to get high from heroin anymore; it just got rid of their withdrawal symptoms.
“But fentanyl is so much stronger that it gets them high again, and that’s part of the reason it broke through,” Westhoff told The Current’s interim host Laura Lynch.
