Congress Attends Hearing on Fentanyl and Carfentanil

Last week Congress sat in a hearing titled “Fentanyl: The Next Wave of the Opioid Epidemic,” which featured experts in the field talking about what can be done to curb the impact of fentanyl and carfentanil (Burch, 2017).

Information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that “overdose deaths related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil increased more than 72 percent between 2014 and 2015” (Burch, 2017). Furthermore, deaths from these substances are most likely underreported due to medical examiners’ lack of resources to test for synthetic opioids consistently.

“People are getting exposed to opioids and going on to fuel their addiction through heroin and fentanyl,” stated Dr. Debra Houry, the director of the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (Burch, 2017). She also commented that the data from 2016, while not fully available, shows an increase in overdose deaths from the aforementioned statistics.

According to an article by addiction news website The Fix,

While the panel agreed that the rise in fentanyl use in the country needs to be addressed by a variety of agencies, Democrats and Republicans differed in their opinion of whether the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would affect use (Burch, 2017).

References

Burch, K. (2017). Congress: Fentanyl is ‘third wave’ of opioid epidemic. Retrieved from https://www.thefix.com/congress-fentanyl-%E2%80%98third-wave%E2%80%99-opioid-epidemic

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