Addicts Are Seeking Out, Dying From Elephant Tranquilizers

10,000 more potent than morphine, hook me up! Naaahhh, it does sound dangerous though.

An elephant tranquillizer, 100 times more potent than fentanyl, is inching its way to Canada and leaving people dead in its wake, say officials, counsellors and police.

Stark warnings about the killer drug, carfentanil, are coming frequently, weeks after a rash of deadly overdoses in Ohio, and about two months after law enforcement seized a shipment of the killer drug at a port in Vancouver. It was marked as printing accessories bound for Calgary.

Carfentanil is a synthetic derivative of the painkiller fentanyl but is labelled as being not for human use in the U.S. It was originally manufactured for veterinary purposes, designed to immobilize large hoofed animals like moose and elephants.

According to Tim Ingram, the health commissioner for Hamilton County in Ohio — where the drug has hit users hard — carfentanil can be:

-- 100 times more potent than fentanyl.

-- 4,000 times more potent than heroin.

-- 10,000 times more potent than morphine.

The drug is a synthetic opioid. It's cheaper, more potent and easier to get than drugs like heroin and cocaine. Dealers are adding it to traditional drugs, sometimes without telling their users.

Back in July, some drug users who survived overdoses in Ohio told investigators they thought they were buying heroin, but tests found none.

"We may be seeing a whole new shift in street drugs in our culture, moving away from traditional heroin and so forth to the synthetic opioids which are much more potent, faster to market and at less cost," Ingram warned. Cont.

Story from - CBC News