DEA issues public warning about deadly black-market pain medications laced with fentanyl and methamphetamine

"The Drug Enforcement Administration issued a public warning Monday that a growing number of pain medications bought on the black market are laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl or the stimulant methamphetamine, driving overdose deaths to record levels," Devlin Barrett reports for The Washington Post. "Officials said the DEA hasn’t issued such a public safety alert since 2015, when the agency warned that agents were seeing an alarming amount of heroin laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl, even in much smaller amounts, is deadlier than street heroin."

Drug overdose deaths in 2020 surpassed a record 93,000, up nearly 30 percent from 2019. "In recent years, the death toll has risen sharply, fueled in large part by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is relatively cheap to manufacture and distribute," Barrett reports. "Last year, drug overdoses killed more than twice as many Americans as car crashes."

Illegal drug trafficking is increasingly shifting from plant-based drugs such as cocaine and heroin to chemical-based drugs such as meth and fentanyl. "The DEA has seized 9.6 million counterfeit pills already this budget year, which is more than it seized in the previous two years combined, officials said. The number of seized counterfeit pills found to contain fentanyl has jumped 430 percent since 2019," Barrett reports.

The drug epidemic, mostly fueled by opioids, has been getting worse since 1999. "At first, that drug abuse centered around prescription pain pills, such as Oxycodone, Vicodin or Percocet," Barrett reports. "In recent years, the death toll has risen sharply, fueled in large part by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is relatively cheap to manufacture and distribute. Last year, drug overdoses killed more than twice as many Americans as car crashes."