Following examples of the drug cocktail being discovered in New York, Alabama, Illinois, and Louisiana, a Washington doctor has warned that marijuana laced with fentanyl is on the rise throughout the US.
The extraordinarily potent synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, is increasingly being combined with other drugs to increase its potency at a lower cost.
As little as two milligrams of fentanyl, or around 10 to 15 grains of table salt, can be fatal, and startling statistics revealed that it kills the same number of people as an entire classroom of kids every week.
Dr Michael Wenzinger, a staff psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine, told KTVI Fox2 on Sunday: ‘In my clinical practice and among some of my peers, we’re seeing more kids reporting they thought they were just smoking marijuana, when drug screens show fentanyl — and they would have toxicological, or medical side effects consistent with that.’
He added that marijuana itself has gotten stronger in recent years.
Dr Wenzinger said: ‘This is sort of turning into an unintentional experiment of, “How does this high potency marijuana affect young people?”‘
He added: ‘The marijuana they may be used to from their childhood is not what we’re dealing with now. We’re dealing with an almost different ballgame of potency.’
The THC concentration — the major psychoactive part of cannabis — rose more than 200 percent from 1995 to 2015.