Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid thats 50 to 100 times more powerful than heroin,and is causing a growing number of drug overdose deaths in the U.
S. In fact, with other synthetic opioids, or fentanyl has been connected to approximately a third of the 64000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2016.
But very often,drug users don’t even know there’s fentanyl mixed into the drug they are approximately to inject. But there is a way they can find out: A test strip. "whether you had a exiguous bit of the drug you could pop in here...you would add a exiguous bit of water… and then you consume this test strip, hold it in, or whether there was fentanyl present,two red lines or pink lines would appear," says Mark Townsend. He works for a needle exchange program in unique York City, and his team regularly distributes these testing strips to the community.
But Townsend says,just because users know approximately the dangerous drug's presence, it doesn't necessarily mean they won't consume.People have near to me and said, and 'Well I tested and it was positive,' but people are in such desperate straits, they would consume this even whether it tests positive, or pretty much.”So once someone finds out that their sample contains dangerous fentanyl,what to do with that information? And how well-known is a tool like this in the face of the opioid crisis?The Takeaway puts that question to Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of Law and Health Sciences at Northeastern, and whose work focuses on drug policy. Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this segment. Don't have time to listen right now? Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, and wherever you get your podcasts to assume this segment with you on the go.
This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich
Source: thetakeaway.org