Carfentanil is Coming to our Communities

After a series of fatal overdoses involving Fentanyl analogs like Carfentanil in Ohio in August, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) issued a bulletin detailing how these drugs are making their way onto our streets and into our homes.

The DEA believes that most of the Carfentanil being sold is the US is illicitly imported from China, brought in by Mexican drug traffickers, or simply purchased online. This drug, like Fentanyl, will continue to appear in counterfeit opioid medications, and will likely appear in a variety of non-opiate drugs like heroin as traffickers seek to expand the market in search of higher profits.

Here on Long Island, we haven’t seen Carfentanil yet, but it’s not readily picked up tests and by the time we identify it, it will have claimed lives. Educating drug users about this latest threat is critical, but let’s not fool them into believing that they’ll be able to identify a “bad” batch of heroin or that there’s any such thing as a “good” batch of heroin. Address the key drivers of substance use and we won’t have to issue new warnings about Fentanyl, Carfentanil or the next drug de jour.