Fentanyl | What Kind of Drug Is It?
Important!
What Kind of Drug Is It?
Fentanyl, when used legally by doctors and anesthesiologistsMedical doctors trained to use medications to sedate a surgery patient., is a powerful, quick-acting painkiller. Its effects begin more quickly than injected drugs, such as heroin or morphine, but the effects do not last as long as either drug. (Entries for heroin and morphine are available in this encyclopedia.) Fentanyl is also the active ingredient in some transdermal patches. Such patches, available by prescription, attach to the skin and transmit the painkiller slowly over a period of hours through the skin cells. Since the mid-1990s the drug has also been available in an oral lozenge, or lollipop, to ease the most extreme forms of cancer pain.
Fentanyl is a synthetic drug, meaning that it is created in the laboratory from chemicals. It is not taken from a plant or an animal. It was created to mimic the effects of organic substances like heroin and morphine. Fentanyl works like those drugs, but it is far more powerful than either—sometimes as much as 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine. Surgeons, anesthesiologists, and oncologists (cancer doctors) are highly trained in the proper uses and the potential dangers of fentanyl, which in its legal form is a Schedule II controlled substance. This means that fentanyl is carefully monitored in hospitals and available only by prescription.
However, fentanyl and its analogsDrugs created in a laboratory, having a slightly different chemical composition than a pharmaceutical, yet having the same effects on the brain as the pharmaceutical. can be produced in illegal labs. Since such drugs create a high for the user, fentanyl has also become an abused drug available unlawfully. Sold on the street, sometimes as "synthetic heroin," it is one of the most unpredictable, addictive, and deadly of illegal drugs.