Editorial: Halloween’s scariest threats? Not razor blades or ‘rainbow’ fentanyl, but rumors and lies
1. Not razor blades or “rainbow” fentanyl
The most frightening scenario that many in the drug war have been talking about all year has been the idea of razor blades used to inflict fatal cuts in the hands of addicts.
In late October, President Donald Trump warned opioid abusers that they would face “very heavy consequences” if they attempted to overdose by using the “most lethal” drug combination in their hands.
If the worst-case scenario is not enough to send your blood pressure surging, a new report from the Johns Hopkins University finds the opioid epidemic is getting even worse.
“There are more heroin addicts in the U.S., the drug is getting more easily available and cheaper and more accessible to the public,” write the authors of the report, “More Deaths by Heroin Overdose in the United States, 2016-2017” (JHU-EP-18-018, Hopkins, 2017) in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The new data is important because it looks at overdose deaths in 2016, 2017 and 2018. The researchers counted all opioid-related overdose deaths in the U.S. from 1999 through 2016. They also focused on overdose deaths from heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids (also known as “new opioids”) because their combination was the most lethal drug combination in 2016. They found that heroin overdoses have gone up by 4 percent annually, from 6.8 to 7.4 death per 100,000 people in 2016 to 8.5 in 2018.
In 2016, fentanyl, an opioid 10,000 times stronger than morphine, accounted for more than two-thirds of all drug overdose deaths. The researchers found that the number of overdose deaths involving fentanyl increased from 841 in 2015 to 871 in 2016, but then fell to 782 in 2017 and 789 in 2018.
But the biggest increase in opioid overdose deaths in 2016 was the