What is fentanyl?
Whenever Andrew Atwell heard that someone had overdosed on potent drug fentanyl, he hunted down the batch – even if the person had died.
He had moved on to the substance after 14 years of shooting up on heroin.
Andrew was one of the many people in the US city of Dayton who was addicted to fatal fentanyl, now an increasing problem in Britain.
He says: “It is just so powerful. For almost my entire adult life I’d danced with the devil while hooked on heroin but no longer did it cut it for me.
“When fentanyl hit the streets I became consumed by it. I’d say to myself, ‘I’m going to spend the least amount of money and get the greatest high I can’.
“It was like playing Russian roulette, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even care if I never woke up again.
“It got to the stage where I’d seen so many friends die, more than 30, I just wanted out myself. I wanted to die.”
Now, barely six months after being in a coma that almost granted him his wish, he says he is clean from drugs for the first time since his early teens.
Fentanyl’s devastating effects are taking hold in all corners of the UK.
Andrew, 36, is speaking out in the hope that people in Britain will heed his warnings about the opioid.
It is already too late for some. Latest figures show fentanyl caused 75 deaths in England and Wales in 2017 – a rise of almost 30% from the 58 in 2016.
Fentanyl – up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine – was first mentioned in UK death certificates two years ago. In some cases, dealers secretly laced other drugs with it to get more people hooked.
Andrew’s recovery is all the more remarkable given he lives in Dayton – America’s ground zero for the fentanyl crisis.
The city in the state of Ohio was once a leader in innovation. It is where citizens Wilbur and Orville Wright worked on the world’s first successful aeroplane. Now it is fentanyl getting the residents high.
The many abandoned buildings are among the addicts’ regular haunts.
Overdose deaths got so bad that the coroners had to rent out refrigerated trailers as the mortuaries ran out of space.
Dayton’s desperate struggle against opioid abuse is a reflection of America, where people are now more likely to die of an overdose than in a road crash.
Over 70,000 were killed by overdoses in 2017. That’s around 192 a day. Almost 42% of the deaths were due to fentanyl or substances designed to mimic it.
Andrew was raised in a single-parent home by a meth-addicted mum.
He says when he was a boy he saw his mother’s teeth being knocked out with a monkey wrench by a violent boyfriend.
Andrew began using cannabis and moved on to prescription pills, then
heroin. He took fentanyl for the first time in September 2017. Working cash in hand at a diner, he would step out of the back door at the end of his shift and be greeted by his fentanyl dealer.
“Nothing mattered to me but drugs,” dad-of-two Andrew says. “I’d earn eighty to a hundred bucks a day, and the entire lot would be gone within minutes of me leaving. Every nickel fed my habit.”
This time last year he was living under a bridge. He would sleep off the drugs as temperatures fell to -20C.
His body became ravaged with a bacterial infection caused by his misuse, and it made him collapse.
When friends found him unconscious by his sleeping bag they thought he was dead. He was admitted to hospital where he went into a coma for two days. When
FENTANYL is a synthetic opioid pain reliever, approved for treating severe pain – typically advanced cancer.
It is up to 100 times more potent than morphine and is prescribed in the form of lozenges or patches applied to the skin. But most recent cases of fentanyl-related harm, overdose, and death in the US are linked to illegally made versions.
It is sold through drug markets for its heroin-like effect.
The drug is often mixed with heroin and/or cocaine as a combination product — with or without the user’s knowledge — to increase its euphoric effects.