A drug, which is purportedly ten thousand times more powerful than morphine, has descended into the United States from drug pushers in Canada, authorities say.
According to Connecticut’s Fox 6, the newly introduced synthetic drug, called W-18, is so strong that even a small amount can kill, scientists warn.
W-18 isn’t in itself a new drug. It was invented some 30 years ago as a substitute for morphine but was deemed too powerful and never really put to much use in the medical field. But now, it has been re-discovered by illegal drug users and is on track to bring a dangerous epidemic of overdoses.
One source for the drug has been online sales out of China, VICE News reported earlier this year.
Canadian authorities warned illegal drug users that pills being sold as fentanyl may have elements of W-18 in them, making the concoction a dangerous mixture.
“We believe W-18 would be coming from China,” a spokesman from the Calgary Police Service Drug Unit said. “Certainly organized crime is behind the importation of fentanyl, and I would make the connection that W-18 would be the same.”
W-18 is only the latest problem with synthetic opioids flooding both Canada and the U.S.
More than 11,000 people died from heroin use in 2014 alone. Fentanyl, a drug 200 times more powerful than heroin, has been sending drug users to the hospital and the morgue for the last several years.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions linked the rise in deaths and the growth of abuse of the drug to our weak southern border, where a steady caravan of drug dealers are smuggling the drug into the country.
In a Senate hearing in January, Sessions said the increased supply of cheap heroin is because of a “lack of enforcement at the border,” which, he said, “is a big part of this.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.