The horizontal line at the bottom of the graph remains flat, indicating little change, until, abruptly, it veers upward to near vertical. This isn’t a chart of the latest Covid surge—it’s the number of confirmed fentanyl overdose deaths in King County since 2008. Five years ago, there were 33. In 2021, there were 396.
Illicit drugs are nothing new, but in the past few years, local public health experts have sounded the alarm about fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that’s 100 times more potent than morphine. “With opioid use disorder, what has happened is an actual rewiring of brain chemistry,” says Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, a principal research
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