Fentanyl (pronounced Fen-ta-nawl)

Here’s an excerpt from an outstanding piece on the devastating results of Fentanyl, a drug that some estimate to be ten times more potent than heroin. Fentanyl is on the streets of Detroit, having killed almost 300 people in the Greater Detroit area. This drug is an equal-opportunity killer—just as many rich folks from the Burbs are dying…
I’ve heard people who live and around Cass Park talk about “Super Heroin” (among other names), but I did not realize its potent destructive power as compared with Cocaine, weed, and heroin.

BY JIM SCHAEFER and JOE SWICKARD
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

In the basement, anything goes. That's where everybody buys their dope. They can shoot it, snort it or smoke it down there. They can turn tricks to earn money for more drugs. It's all good.

Except tonight, something's bad. There are shouts from upstairs, and smacking sounds. And now water is dripping through the basement ceiling.

In this lair of strangers, where Detroiters get high next to users from Sterling Heights, Royal Oak, Pontiac and Ferndale, all of them drawn together by the pangs of heroin addiction, this is something different.
This is something alarming.

"Lauren!" someone shouts from up above, on the ground floor at 20152 Keating St. in Detroit. Then more of those smacks. "Lauren, wake up!"
"Sit her up!"

A guy known as Tommy comes through a side door with bags of ice, which he hauls upstairs.

The basement people watch him climb out of view.

What's going on?

Ralph, the man upstairs selling the drugs tonight, assures the people below that the girl's OK. Ralph is in charge of the dope house right now. And as lawless as a drug den might seem, there are rules. And one of them is: Customers don't go upstairs. She's OK, Ralph tells the basement people.

And so they return to their business. This isn't their sister or their classmate or their daughter. It's just another doper in a dope house, and, reality is, people overdose.

She'll be OK.

And the water drips. Someone moves over a bucket.

But it's not OK.

Upstairs, Ralph is shaking Lauren Jolly, a 17-year-old with a pretty face and light, shoulder-length brown hair, a former Brownie Scout, a junior at Birmingham Groves High School, a heroin addict her friends can no longer help.

It's May 24, 2006, and she is about to become the public face of fentanyl, a nasty laboratory concoction often mixed with heroin that exploded on the streets of Detroit, ending the lives of hundreds of metro-Detroit drug users, and more than 1,000 people nationwide.

The drug stole a once-promising young bowler from Shelby Township, a retired autoworker from Detroit, an ex-logger from out state and the lead guitarist in a rock band.

Inside the house in Detroit, a 21-year-old from Pontiac named Ben puts his fingers to the neck of the Bloomfield Township teen and feels a slow pulse.
Someone draws cold water and pours it over Lauren.

The girl is still breathing, but her pulse is faint, her blood pressure plummeting. Her eyes roll back ... and she is somewhere else.

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The article can be read here.