Fentanyl overdose problem is spreading.

Undercover Orlando police officers don’t have much trouble finding dealers who claim to be selling heroin.

Recently, though, lab tests are showing that what officers are buying on the street isn’t heroin, but something even deadlier — a painkiller known as fentanyl, typically prescribed after surgery or for patients with a terminal illness. It is as much as 50 times stronger than heroin.

“Sometimes it’s 100 percent fentanyl,” said Lt. Rich Lane, who oversees OPD’s Drug Enforcement Division. “But it’s always sold to us as heroin and that’s the scary part ... it’s like heroin on steroids.”

This is how so many addicts looking for their next hit end up as another number in the morgue.

They think they are shooting up with the dope they know. They have no idea they were just sold a fatal dose.

At 100 times more potent than morphine, it only takes a little fentanyl to kill.

Joshua Stephany, interim medical examiner for Orange and Osceola counties, says more people are dying this way.

Back in 2013, his office tallied just 18 deaths tied to fentanyl. In 2014, 34 people died after taking the synthetic opiate. The number of fentanyl deaths more than doubled in 2015 to 70.

So far, in the first three months of this year, there have been five cases of fentanyl-related fatal overdoses.

And that number is likely to go up because Stephany is still waiting on lab results to come back on some cases.

As this community attempts to get a handle on the surge in heroin overdoses, which is making a mark on neighborhoods from Bithlo to Windermere and was the subject of a recent Orange County task force, fentanyl must command our attention, too.

This is what police and addicts — and, yes, those two can be on the same team — are now up against: dealers who have no idea what they are really selling or just don’t care.

“I call it bad business,” Stephany says, because dealers are slowly killing off their client base.

But Lane of OPD says dealers couldn’t be less concerned.

When addicts hear about a rash of overdoses — such as the deaths that occurred last summer at the condemned condominium complex Blossom Park — dealers consider that good marketing.

“They flock to that area,” Lane said. “It’s the complete opposite of the way you and I think ... [Dealers] spike it [with fentanyl] because they want to be known as having the best stuff. But they aren’t pharmacists.”

That isn’t even the scariest part.

This problem is spreading beyond heroin junkies.

In the Tampa Bay area, police have found overdose victims with counterfeit oxycodone and Xanax pills laced with fentanyl.

“What we are now seeing are deaths of persons associated with fentanyl that are not known to use IV drugs, but rather pills obtained on the street or black market,” said William Pellan, director of investigations at the medical examiner’s office in Pinellas and Pasco counties. "These are pills that are being pressed out to appear to be authentic pharmaceutical Xanax and/or oxycodone. ... This is particularly alarming and very dangerous, considering the potency of fentanyl.”

He said at least nine deaths so far this year in the Tampa Bay area have been tied to pills found to contain fentanyl.

And Stephany, the medical examiner in Orange County, says he has sent a few recent cases to the lab to test for counterfeit pills.

This is the new frontier in fighting overdoses.

A drug that doctors have long prescribed in patch form to control pain at the end of patients’ lives is now being manufactured by drug cartels and used to increase the potency of other street drugs.

Police want to get the word out.

“I didn’t even know what fentanyl was until six or seven years ago,” Lane said of the time he started to encounter the drug as a homicide detective

Now it’s become far more routine.

And Lane has a message for addicts and their families.

“Don’t lose hope,” he said. “They’re not alone.”

When addicts hear about a rash of overdoses, dealers consider that good marketing.