The latest news ... recent seizure of 100 pounds of fentanyl had enough doses to poison the entire population of New York City and New Jersey.
What is this drug that is killing so many people? Fentanyl, known as the elephant tranquilizer because of its insanely powerful effect, is 50 times more powerful than heroin. It is hitting the streets as a heroin boost and it's being used to produce counterfeit oxycodone. And it's leaving a hideous path of death of unsuspecting users.
Whenever you hear of a celebrity that has suddenly died of overdose recently, fentanyl is right there in the mix ... Prince and Tom Petty, the two most prominent lately.
Here's why ... on the left is a lethal dose of heroin. On the right, a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Heroin and fentanyl look the same and most times people do not know what they are taking. As the director of the State Police forensic lab in NH stated, "You're injecting yourself with a loaded gun."
The stats are that 43,000 Americans died from opiod overdoses in 2016. Those are the latest numbers from the Center for Disease Control. When the numbers come out for 2017, they will be much worse than that. Opiod overdose deaths have now overtaken gun deaths in the US.
This epidemic has reached crisis proportions and in my next blog on this issue, I'll dive into the reasons why opiod addiction has skyrocked in the last few years and also how bitcoin plays into this story.
The short story is that Fentanyl pills are being sold to customers in the US from China to the tune of $800 million over the last two years and Chinese sellers used bitcoin as their preferred method of payment because of anonymity. As proponents of cryptocurrencies, what are our thoughts on this?