Fans mourned when the musician Prince overdosed on an extremely potent heroin variant named fentanyl. But Prince may be yet another tragic casualty of something Americans ignore at their peril. New evidence suggests that the American heroin epidemic — heroin use went up over 300 percent between 2007 and 2014 — is responsible for a demonstrable spike in deaths. And Mexican drug cartels, which produce fentanyl, are the culprits.
Fifty to a hundred times stronger than common street heroin, fentanyl is often mixed or “cut” with filler and its less potent cousin, reducing the dose necessary to give users a high. It's also being mixed with black market pharmaceuticals like Norco, a common painkiller. Even more shockingly, fentanyl has found its way into counterfeit prescriptions for the common anti-anxiety medicine, Xanax, which is not even an opioid.
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