Fentanyl sold to UK drug users on Chinese websites

♦ Chinese ebay-style sites are selling the dangerous opioid fentanyl to British drug users, it has emerged.

Websites based in China are offering to ship the lethal substance, which can be 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, to the UK for a few hundred pounds, an investigation by The Guardian has found.

The number of deaths in England and Wales caused by the synthetic opioid, which is used for executions in US states such as Texas, soared by 29 per cent in 2017, according to the Office for National Statistics.

According to The Guardian, one of China’s largest e-commerce sites is hosting sellers that offered to ship the drug to the UK.

When approached by the newspaper, one seller, who offered 50g for $700 (£540) said: “Our fentanyl powder is very pure. We can send safely to the UK.”

A spokesman for the website said that it regularly checked for sellers of illegal drugs, and deleted those accounts.