“Anything I put in me, I definitely want to know what’s in it,” a man, a heroin user in Baltimore, once said to a researcher. “They’re dropping like flies off this stuff.”
This “stuff” is fentanyl, an opioid drug 50 times more potent than heroin. It’s now the leading cause of fatal overdoses nationwide, killing about two people a day in Baltimore alone.
The man was part of a three-city study last year — in Baltimore, Boston, and Providence, Rhode Island — that encouraged users to test their own drugs with a $1 fentanyl test strip that resembles a pregnancy test.
Public health experts nationwide, mostly in big cities, are providing fentanyl test strips to drug users to let them test the drugs for themselves. Intended to test for fentanyl in urine, the strips also work in water mixed with a sample of a drug, revealing one red stripe for the presence of fentanyl and two stripes for none detected.”
Read more at: https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/fentanyl-test-strips-opioid-epidemic
Source: BuzzFeed.com – May 8, 2018
