I wrote about Fentanyl 32-years ago

Unfortunately few were listening

In January 1990, in an article entitled “The Next Nightmare,” I reported about the emerging multi-billion dollar illegal trade in “designer drugs,” led by fentanyl. An amount of fentanyl “no larger than a loaf of bread” was “worth $1 billon on the black market.”

“The first group mimics heroin and other opiates. It is composed of deriv­ative drugs (analogues) produced from a synthetic anesthetic called fentanyl. It may be the most powerful addictive drug of its kind, nearly 40 times stronger than pure heroin. Chemical derivatives of fentanyl can be 6,000 times as strong as morphine. Fentanyl provides a dra­matic rush for the user, much more in­tense than a dose of heroin. However, the trade-off for this fleeting pleasure is addiction. The drug is addictive after a single shot, and the kick often ends in overdose. In Pittsburgh in 1988, a spate of 18 overdoses from street fentanyl marketed as China White is the most recent sign of the drug's killer potential. Sometimes the batch of drugs…