Federal agents and local police seized thousands of counterfeit opioid pills at a gas station in Centralia, Washington, on Sept. 16, prompting the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to put out a warning that a drug “100 times more deadly than fentanyl” was on the streets in the Pacific Northwest.
The drug is called carfentanil, a potent synthetic opioid that isn’t approved for human use, the DEA said in a statement.
Federal officials said that the Sept. 16 seizure was the result of months of investigation that led police to the Centralia gas station, where they found a truck with more than 50,000 pills inside. The DEA added that the pills contained a mixture of carfentanil and acetaminophen. The driver, who is from Pacific, Washington, but whose name hasn’t been released, is facing unspecified federal charges.
The bust reflects the increased prevalence of the fentanyl analog. The DEA reports that carfentanil has been detected in 37 states.
While fentanyl is still the primary cause of drug overdoses in the U.S., the number of known deaths due to carfentanil has grown from 29 in the first six months of 2023 to 238 during the same period the following year, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The drug is so potent — it can be deadly in nearly microscopic quantities — that it’s not approved for use in human beings. Fentanyl, on the other hand, is legitimately used for pain relief in medical settings.
Carfentanil was originally designed in the 1970s as a rapid-onset tranquilizer for large animals such as elephants. Then militaries around the world started looking into it as a chemical weapon.
The Associated Press reported that the U.S., China, Israel, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and India have all considered using the drug for military purposes, and in 2002 Russian special forces used an aerosolized cocktail that included carfentanil to gas Chechen separatists who were holding hundreds of people hostage in a Moscow theater.
The Russian attack incapacitated the hostage-takers, allowing Russian forces to storm the theater and shoot the separatists, but the drug also killed more than 120 hostages.
In recent years, drug traffickers have homed in on the chemical for various reasons, and the DEA said that much of the carfentanil that’s been seized since 2024 were mixed with a filler and pressed into pills or tablets, possibly increasing the risk of overdose because they look like other drugs. The CDC reports that fentanyl test strips — which can be used at home by people who use drugs — sometimes fail to detect the substance.
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