Madeleine Sweet’s fentanyl addiction started with an unexpected freebie. Already addicted to opioids and grappling with the sense that her life was going bottom-up as her student debts mounted, she was finding it difficult to access enough oxycodone and other opiates to satisfy her dependency.
So, in 2016, Sweet gravitated to the dark web. That’s where sellers were hawking designer drugs crafted to hijack the brain’s reward system, including mass-produced fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin. Sweet reached out to a seller for designer opiates and was sent a gram of fentanyl as a free sample with her purchase.
Soon, the sample arrived at her home in Monterey, California — a postage-stamp-sized bag of what looked like taupe-colored powdered sugar. Seconds after Sweet snorted the powder, an atomic-scale dopamine rush buried her in ecstasy. She came to a few minutes later with her head resting on her knees, her outlook altered. “I was like, now that I have this, I can just do everything I ever wanted to do, because I will enjoy it,” she says. “It just landed in my lap. And then it was hard to go back.” Once she started taking fentanyl, other opioids weren’t powerful enough to keep her from experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
Though she didn’t realize it at the time, Sweet was among millions of Americans who would get sucked into the drug’s undertow. Fentanyl was becoming more widely available on the streets; in the early to mid-2010s, the drug began muscling its way into an opioid trade once dominated by heroin and prescription pills. By 2017, Homeland Security Investigations, the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative branch, was seizing almost 2,400 pounds of illicit fentanyl annually.
This shift has ushered in catastrophic results. Because fentanyl and similar lab-made compounds are so much more potent than other opioids, users’ risk of overdosing is significantly higher. Fentanyl overdose is now one of the most common causes of death among 18- to 49-year-olds in the U.S., and synthetic opioids have already claimed more American lives than the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam wars put together. The drugs continue to kill about 150 people in the U.S. each day.
