The numbers come from so-called consumption rooms – places where addicts can inject or smoke illegal drugs using clean utensils in a safe environment. The employees then ask them if they can receive the packaging and send it to a laboratory. This way you can find out whether it is really “just” cocaine or heroin – or whether the street dealer may have added cutting agents.
This has been happening in Hamburg and Hanover, Frankfurt, Berlin and the Rhineland for about ten years. And the tests confirm the suspicion: street material is dirty, wildly stretched. The substances mixed in are often dangerous and damage internal organs.
But now things are getting really dangerous, because discoveries of the anesthetic drug fentanyl are also increasing in Germany. The German Aid Aid has just published the latest figures: According to this, Hamburg leads the sad statistics, with more than one in ten servings of heroin laced with it, followed by samples from Düsseldorf and Münster, with almost ten percent.
Source: Infographic WELT
A total of 17 different consumption rooms were tested for six months.
What is already causing major health problems in the USA appears to be repeating itself in Europe. Fentanyl is now one of the most commonly used drugs there; it first appeared as an admixture and then was sold pure. It’s good business for the dealers: fentanyl is not a natural substance, opium poppies do not have to be grown to obtain it, and production is not only cheap, it is also completely legal.
Fentanyl is used in medicine for very severe pain, such as cancer, and for anesthesia. The substance is actually only available on prescription, but apparently that can be avoided. It can be purchased from pharmaceutical retailers in all conceivable forms, as an injection solution and as tablets, as a nasal spray and as a plaster. The latter are particularly popular with fentanyl addicts: the patches can be easily crushed and burned on silver paper, the substance can be inhaled, and the high is then particularly strong.
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Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, which means it targets the same receptor sites in the body as opiates, such as heroin, morphine or opium. The problem is that it is a hundred times more powerful than morphine, meaning it not only quickly becomes addictive, but can also be easily overdosed. Then there is a risk of death due to respiratory arrest. “While 200 milligrams of heroin are fatal, with fentanyl it is just two milligrams,” says the AIDS service.
So even a hundredth of the correspondingly dangerous dose of heroin is fatal. “If users don’t know about the additive, their lives are in danger.” The official statistics for 2022 show that 83 people died from synthetic opioids. “The real number is likely to be higher, as toxicological reports are usually not prepared for drug-related deaths.”
Normal medications often don’t help
Aidshilfe therefore advocates offering rapid tests for fentanyl in consumption rooms, using a simple test strip. If they work, the dose can be divided into smaller portions. The numbers just published come from a model project with these rapid tests. It is not yet clear whether it can be extended or expanded.
But there is still a problem: If an overdose occurs, with fentanyl it can be so strong that the antidote naloxone, established for drug emergencies with heroin, can no longer do anything. Too much time often passes before the emergency doctor notices the problem.
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That’s why chemists at the University of Waterloo in the Canadian province of Ontario have now developed a blood test that works in about two minutes if patients have taken fentanyl. This is twice as fast as previous tests in laboratories and hospitals, according to a university press release. If push comes to shove, the machine can even analyze 96 blood samples at the same time.
“Let’s say someone is in the emergency room with an overdose, and doctors need to quickly determine what they took in order to treat them effectively. The speed of our method can be life-saving,” says Emir Nazdrajić, who has just published the study in the journal “Analytical Chemistry”.
In Canada, about 7,000 people die from fentanyl every year. In the new method, researchers place a small amount of blood into a 96-well plate. It goes into an apparatus the size of an espresso machine and it does the rest, extracting the opioids and using them to carry out a mass spectrometer analysis.
“There is a high demand for rapid screening methods,” says co-author Janusz Pawliszyn. “Our method doesn’t just work with fentanyl; other medications and certain types of illnesses can also be found very quickly.”