It is bad enough that over 250 Canadians died of fentanyl overdoses last year, but now police and health officials have an even more dangerous drug to worry about.
Staff Sgt. Dave Knibbs said Edmonton police seized about four kilograms of the white powder in December 2015, that was tested and confirmed to be W-18 by Health Canada, reports CTV News Canada.
Knibbs told reporters that W-18 is 100 times more powerful than fentanyl and is 10,000 times more powerful than morphine. He added that W-18 pills were also found in Calgary earlier this year. “Fentanyl has taken far too many lives across the province and W-18 represents an even more significant threat,” he said Wednesday, according to the Huffington Post.
Dr. Laura Calhoun of Alberta Health Services says W-18, a μ-opioid agonist with a distinctive chemical structure, is not regulated under federal drug laws and has no clinical use. It cannot be detected using routine drug testing. “Our message to the public is this: no matter what drug you use, fentanyl or W-18 may be hiding in it, and they may kill you,” she said.
Like most illegal drugs in North America, the powdered chemical has been traced back to laboratories in China. Interestingly, the chemical itself was invented by three Canadian scientists in the early 1980s as an opioid. It was never actually tested on humans or picked up by a pharmaceutical company, so the formula sat on a shelf gathering dust until being revived by the wrong people.
As legal painkillers such as OxyContin and Percocet become more difficult to get, drug users are turning to the more potent street drugs to maintain their habit, and those drugs are becoming more dangerous. Health officials are urging the public to avoid buying any street drugs because you really don’t know what is in them. These drugs will kill you.
