Created by a brilliant, well-intentioned Belgian chemist, the potent opioid now kills 20 people a day
The Public Health Agency of Canada reports that, in the first half of last year, 3,556 people died of apparent, a rate of about 20 deaths per day. In other words, on average, someone was dying somewhere in Canada nearly every hour, day and night. In the worst-hit province, British Columbia, deaths from illegal narcotics exceed those from murders, suicides, car accidents and prescription-drug overdoses combined.
He studied chemistry, founded his own company and began turning out an arsenal of successful drugs for combating everything from schizophrenia to athlete’s foot. One of them was a variation on morphine many times more powerful than the famous painkiller. The fast-acting new wonder drug calmed even the extreme pain of surgery and cancer. He called it fentanyl.
Opioids – such as morphine, named for the Greek god of dreams – have helped people ease their pain for generations. But as Paul Janssen studied the molecules that gave them their potency, he saw room for improvement., American journalist Sam Quinones describes the Belgian as “among the most fertile scientific minds of the 20th century.”
Already in use for medical anesthesia by the late 1960s, the drug was so effective that it soon spread beyond the operating theatre. Doctors prescribed it in pills, slow-release pain-relief patches applied to the skin and even a fast-acting flavoured lollipop.Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams/The Canadian Press
Fentanyl offered the perfect solution. Because it could be cooked up in a lab by manipulating chemicals instead of refining opium, traffickers didn’t have to worry about a poppy blight in Afghanistan, a heroin eradication program in Thailand or a drug enforcement crackdown at North American ports. Today, fentanyl is no longer just a dangerous adulterant, polluting other drugs. It is the mainstream street narcotic, ubiquitous, commonplace, a market leader. People who work in safe-injection sites or drug-testing labs say they rarely see heroin anymore. It is fentanyl, fentanyl, fentanyl.
Just as other drugs are mixed into fentanyl, fentanyl is often mixed into other drugs. Weekend warriors doing lines of cocaine at a party may find they have taken fentanyl. These days, fentanyl is in everything and everything is in fentanyl.Jimmy Jeong/The Canadian Press Margaret Thompson, medical director of the Ontario, Manitoba and Nunavut Poison Centres, says fentanyl and other opioids affect the brain’s ability to detect high levels of carbon dioxide. In normal breathing, a person breathes out to expel carbon dioxide and in to get oxygen. Fenantyl disrupts that process. Breathing slows and, if the dose is big enough, eventually stops.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
Similar News:Vous pouvez également lire des articles d'actualité similaires à celui-ci que nous avons collectés auprès d'autres sources d'information.
This realtor created a Tinder for property co-ownership - Macleans.ca“Tinder for real estate is our elevator pitch.” Toronto’s housing market is unaffordable for most people, and LesliGaynor wants to change that. She co-founded HusMates, an app that connects buyers looking to co-own property:
Lire la suite »
Women powered pandemic shift toward higher paying jobs, but pay gap persists: RBC reportOf the $21-billion in additional income created by the movement to higher paid sectors over the COVID-19 pandemic, $9-billion or 43% was funnelled to women, the report found
Lire la suite »
Oscars 2023: The #MeToo movies movement that wasn’tWhen MeToo took off in October, 2017, it had a momentum that created positive change. How quickly that momentum sputtered
Lire la suite »
Three Sixty, First Project In New Vancouver I-1C Zoning, LaunchesThe first-ever project under Vancouver's new zoning district has officially launched, bringing a nine storey mixed-use development to Mount Pleasant. Stranddev | AY_Canada | realestate realestatenews developments mixeduse Vancouver
Lire la suite »
Glitchless Filter Has People Feeling Bad About Themselves When They Turn It Off As It’s Eerily RealisticTikTok created a new filter that has no glitches and actually looks like your face, which got people worried and a bit creeped out.
Lire la suite »
![Gauging the impact of Boosted Pools on Balancer’s [BAL] market trend](https://i.headtopics.com/images/2023/3/8/cryptoamb/gauging-the-impact-of-boosted-pools-on-balancer-s--gauging-the-impact-of-boosted-pools-on-balancer-s--1633355620714795010.webp?w=640)
Gauging the impact of Boosted Pools on Balancer’s [BAL] market trendBalancer’s TVL fell after the introduction of Boosted Pools, before recording a brief uptick Balancer (BAL) has, however, remained flat of late More than a year ago, Balancer created its Boosted Pool to attract liquidity to the protocol by providing investors with additional incentives. How balanced has this made the protocol and its native token […]
Lire la suite »