fentanyl

China banned fentanyl last year, but an NPR investigation reveals how Chinese vendors continue to market the chemicals used to make the drug on e-commerce and social media sites.

New research shows the use of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl spreading fast in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Seattle. Chinese companies are routing the street drug through cartels in Mexico.

The Drug Enforcement Agency relies on hospitals to identify nurses and doctors who misuse drugs such as morphine and fentanyl. But "only a fraction of those who are diverting drugs are ever caught."

"During the pandemic, basically everything is pointed in the wrong direction," says one federal health official, who calls the convergence of COVID-19 and America's addiction crisis "a nightmare."

Public health officials are adopting a law-enforcement tool, the mass spectrometer, to instantly identify potentially deadly levels of opioids in local drug supplies.

The traffickers were caught with 11.9 kilograms of fentanyl — enough to kill nearly 6 million people, by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's standard.

Fentanyl, Inc. author Ben Westhoff says the opioid, while useful in hospitals, is killing more Americans as a street drug than any other in U.S. history. Here's how it moves from China to your corner.

The Skaggs family released a statement suggesting that an Angels employee may have supplied the pitcher with the drugs that killed him.

The maker of a highly addictive fentanyl-based drug wants to sell its assets to pay some $250 million in debts. The move could let the company out of part of the settlement deal reached last week.

Some manufacturers evaded scrutiny by slightly modifying the molecular structures of substances. Monday's announcement "puts a wider array of substances under regulation," a Chinese official says.