Fentanyl Now the Leading Killer Drug in the US

Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: La Jornada

Janel Wentz and Tim Firestone hold up an image of their son, the former mayor of Mount Carbon, Washington; Brandon Wentz, who died from this drug. Fentanyl outweighs heroin as the most lethal drug in the US.

Washington: Fentanyl, a synthetic drug, has overtaken heroin as the deadliest drug in the United States, claiming more than 18,000 lives in 2016, federal health officials said Wednesday.

In 2016, the last year for which complete data are available, 29 percent of deaths from drug overdoses were related to fentanyl, said the report from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Diseases of the United States.

Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic narcotic that has been attributed the death of rock stars like Prince and Tom Petty. It works in the brain like morphine or heroin, but is 50 to 100 times more potent, and can easily lead to an overdose.

Excerpt from Rolling Stone:

After months of speculation, a medical examiner ruled that Tom Petty died of an accidental overdose, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. The Hall of Fame musician had taken several pain medications, including Fentanyl, oxycodone and generic Xanax. Other medications included generic Restoril (a sleep aid) and generic Celexa (which treats depression).

The coroner’s office listed Petty’s official cause of death as “multisystem organ failure due to be resuscitated cardiopulmonary arrest due to mixed drug toxicity,” noting the singer suffered from coronary artery atherosclerosis and emphysema.

Petty had been prescribed the drugs to treat emphysema, knee issues and a fractured hip, his family said in a statement accompanying the results. Petty’s coronary artery disease had been a persistent problem throughout his final tour.

“Despite this painful injury, he insisted on keeping his commitment to his fans and he toured for 53 dates with a fractured hip and, as he did, it worsened to a more serious injury,” Petty’s wife Dana and daughter Adria wrote in the statement. “On the day he died, he was informed his hip had graduated to a full-on break and it is our feeling that the pain was simply unbearable and was the cause for his overuse of medication.”

Petty was found unconscious and not breathing at his Malibu home on October 2nd, 2017. He was rushed to a hospital where he was placed on life support. Although he had a pulse, doctors found no brain activity when he arrived and the decision was made to pull life support. He died hours later.

Petty said he’d experimented with cocaine over the years (“[It] was never a good look,” he told Men’s Journal) and drinking (“I didn’t like the taste or the buzz,” he said). But it was in the late Nineties, when he was in his late 40s and two decades after he’d become a superstar, that he developed an addiction to heroin after a bitter divorce from his first wife. “Tried to go cold turkey, and that wouldn’t work,” he said in author Warren Zanes’ book Petty: The Biography. “It’s an ugly fucking thing.” He sought out treatment for his addiction and remarried in 2001.

The death rate from drug overdoses in the United States has tripled from 1999 to 2016, as the nation faces a persistent opioid epidemic.