A wave of homemade, synthetic drugs sweeps US and deepens crisis

In Columbus, Ohio, Mike, a 48-year-old former soldier with a 20-year opioid addiction, smokes fentanyl bought for a few dollars in an alley. Entirely synthetic fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more powerful than heroin and is often mixed with synthetic tranquillisers that make overdoses harder to reverse. US overdose deaths, mostly involving opioids, fell from a peak of 110,000 in 2022 to around 70,000 last year, but the crisis is not over. The report warns that naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses, may not have been enough to save Mike because he was taking more than fentanyl.