How Fentanyl Became So Deadly

VIDEO – MONEY –

May 5, 2023 – Fentanyl was not created to be used recreationally or bought and sold on the street.

In the early 1960s the synthetic opioid was manufactured and approved by the FDA a few years later, for a specific purpose: to treat pain.

“I’ve used it for five decades in anesthesia,” Dr. C.M. Schade, a North Texas pain doctor of more than 50 years, said. “It has a very rapid onset, but it lasts an hour and half.”

According to the National Institute of Health and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fentanyl’s two main purposes were to be prescribed to chronic pain patients as well as for anesthesia during surgery.”

Schade is also an emeritus board member of the Texas Pain Society and is the elected presiding officer of the Prescription Monitoring Program Advisory Committee.

He said the path fentanyl took from being a useful, effective tool for doctors to claiming the lives thousands weaves through history. Schade describes trends in prescribing opioids as a pendulum swing, with doctors alternating between years of under-prescribing chronic pain patients to over-prescribing based on what regulations existed at the time.

In both instances, patients were left to hang in the balance.