AUTHORITIES ARE ON THE BACK FOOT AS THE LAB-MADE OPIOID FENTANYL CONTINUES TO FATALLY FLOOD THE MARKET
In September 2023, two months before his second birthday,Nicholas Feliz Dominici’s parents enrolled their son at anursery in New York City. But tragedy struck in the first week when he was found unresponsive in the room where he and the other toddlers took their midday nap. Paramedics were unable to revive him and when the police arrived, they were horrified to discover astash of fentanyl hidden in the floorboards beneath Nicholas’ mattress. The one year old had become yet another victim of the synthetic opioid that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Three other children at the nursery were hospitalised in the incident, but mercifully recovered. Nicholas didn’t even ingest the drug, but fentanyl is so potent, just being exposed to it can be fatal. The forensic team dispatched to the scene estimated there was enough of the drug to potentially kill 500,000 people. The owner of the nursery and her lodger were charged with possession of narcotics with intent to distribute resulting in death. The owner’s husband, who was caught on CCTV fleeing the nursery clutching several bags before his wife called 911, escaped arrest.
The heart-breaking story is one of many that chillingly illustrate the devastating and ever-growing fentanyl epidemic in the US. In 2022 alone, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) seized 380million doses of the drug, each just two milligrams in weight –enough to kill every single person in the country. In 2021, 70,000 people were killed by overdoses that involved fentanyl, afive-fold increase in five years, while since 2014, an estimated 325,000 Americanshavediedasaresultoftaking illegallymanufacturedsynthetic opioids.
MEDICAL HISTORY
Fentanyl was invented by Belgian scientist Dr Paul Janssen in 1959. While working on developing painkillers that could be used as an intravenous anaesthetic during surgery, Janssen stumbled on the formula for fentanyl, which was up to 100 times more powerful than morphine. By 1963, it was being used in hospitals across Western Europe on patients on the operating table. It was, at first, adifferent story in America. The incredible potency of the drug rang alarm bells because critics could already see that the new synthetic narcotic was aprime candidate for recreational abuse, so it wasn’t until 1968 that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light for fentanyl to be used in surgical procedures. The first cases of fentanyl being misused, either as aresult of theft or illicit prescriptions, were reported in the mid-1970s. By the early 1980s, however, drug dealers were getting in on the act after they started ma
