Fentanyl

A pill for every ill

Fentanyl

A potent synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin, Fentanyl was invented - synthesised - by Dr. Paul Janssen and the Janssen Company of Beerse, Belgium, in 1960. It was originally an  intravenous analgesic applied clinically in Europe in 1963 and in the US as an admixure in Innovar in 1968 and is now one of the most frequently used opioid analgesics in medical intervention. The molecule is straightforward and can be easily manipulated and produced in large quantities. The idea was to vitiate the side effects of more traditional opioids such as opium-derived morphine and heroin. Analgesia typically occurs within 2 minutes intravenously and up to 10 minutes when applied topically and is relatively short acting. The smaller amounts necessary to provoke analgesia and its synthetic origins made Fentanyl both inexpensive and effective as a painkiller. It was adopted as a “stress-free anesthesia“ which gave deep pain relief with little alteration of heart response and which also blocked stress hormones typically associated with surgical intervention. This clinical success led to an increase in adoption and sales which increased 10-fold when the opioid came off patent in 1981 and led to an increase in development and  production of other synthetic opioids. 

Fentanyl’s cheapness and ease of production made it an ideal street drug to be sold on its own or, more commonly, as a lacing agent. Since 1979 dealers have used it to cut and bulk out the more expensive and harder to obtain heroin and its analogues. The growth in illicit production is centered in China, Mexico and India, then exported as powder or pills, particularly to the United States. Fentanyl’s high strength leads to users, unaware of adulteration, overdosing and dying. Even a small amount can be deadly. In the year 2020 to 2021 more than 100,000 Americans died from overdose with 64% due to Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids which reduce breathing rates and accounts for the majority of the deaths. The crash, the characteristic zombie stance, which follows injestion, can lead to permanant sleep. It has become a scourge as the deadliest drug on the streets of Los Angeles and many other American cities. Users lie immobile where they fall or stand doubled, bowed down to the ground and nodding out. It should be, and now is, classed as a disease. A dis-ease.

Cooking the drug requires caution; boots, gloves, aprons, respirators are required to mitigate the toxicity of the process. The chemical precursors for the manufacture come from China and increase the potency. In Mexico alone there are hundreds of makeshift labs producing Fentanyl for the cartels which then move the product across the border and into the distrubution network in the United States. A cook for the Sinaloa Cartel explains the reasoning and morality of his job: "Everyone uses this voluntarily, and more people die from the weapons the US makes than from fentanyl." The reach of the drug cartels is worldwide.

Fentanyl is a signifier of the new normal world. An addictive pharmaceutical which mirrors the “legitimate” big pharma corporate model; get someone hooked on SSRIs or the drugs used to facilitate transition or the covid potions and you have a consumer and an income stream for life. The bottom line is profit and the happy side-effect is control. Fent is perfect for a medicated world with a pill for every ill and to be healthy is an undiagnosed problem to be solved because everybody is sick, they just don’t know it yet. 

The illicit drugs of my youth were hash, African bush, psilocybin mushrooms, speed, and later, LSD and MDMA. These tended to open the mind, to enhance understanding and to waken spiritual conciousness, that dim light within us. Smack, Fent, downers, shut down the inner light, like booze, get you truly “out of it”. This suits the would-be controllers of society; a zomboid population on downers which drown the spirit and the thought of resistance and another step on the road to total control. Fentanyl is a Class A drug in the UK, very telling in that it’s prescibed by the medical profession - legalised drug pushers - as an effective pain killer. It kills pain very effectively in a medical setting but what pain does it mitigate on the streets, on people who have pain in their souls?

The question remains? What is the pain in the brain, in the soul, in the living healthy being that is mitigated by opioids, end-of-life palliatives like Fentanyl?

May fire fall on the dealers and the stealers of life
on the streets and in sterile medical spaces 
where lives are wasted, the doctor writing out a scrip
the pusher on the corner, both the same
but the blame falls on the latter not the former 
captured by hubris, bolstered by success
certificates to prove it, upstanding and correct
and the house in the country to validate the mess
a legalised dealer in an office, a pusher, cowardly thug
fuck their final solution, the juice that kills
their injections, interventions, and Fentanyl