This Is What Makes Certain Opioids More Deadly Than Others

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 932,000 people have died from a drug overdose in the U.S. since 1999. In 2020 alone, nearly 100,000 people died from an overdose. The main cause? Synthetic opioids — specifically fentanyl. This sharp rise in opioid-related overdoses in recent years includes almost 69,000 deaths in 2020. Of those deaths, 82.3 percent of them involved synthetic opioids, which are artificially produced. But what makes synthetic opioids so