Experts discuss fentanyl facts

Crisis worsens

BY HALEY LENA HLENA@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

As part of Douglas County’s Youth Initiative Facts about Fentanyl discussion, Lindsey Simbeye, an external relations strategist for Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention explained how opioids such as fentanyl work in the body and how to reverse an overdose.

Both illicitly manufactured fentanyl and pharmaceutical fentanyl are considered synthetic opioids. It is often used in labor and delivery, for acute pain situations and for end of life measures for pain suppression.

Fentanyl goes into the system quickly and lasts for 30 to 60 minutes. It is also up to 50 times stronger than heroin and up to 100 times stronger than morphine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

e body has opioid receptors all throughout and when a person takes an opioid, it binds to those receptors and transfers information to di erent systems throughout the body, such as the limbic and central nervous system.

When the opioid a ects the limbic system, it is a ecting the brain reward system, which causes the euphoric feeling. Opioids chemically connect to the central nervous system which a ect the automated body responses within the brainstem and can suppress the respiratory system, causing the overdose.

Tolerance builds quickly to the euphoria and to the pain, said Simbeye. e respiratory depression tolerance does not build as quickly, which is what makes opioids so fatal or so potentially fatal when they’re being misused or used in excess.

“ e latest I’ve heard is that an average dose for someone who is in active use for fentanyl, they can be using anywhere from 20 to 50 pills a day, that is purely so they can survive throughout the day and stave o withdrawal symptoms,” said Simbeye. e long-term e ects of using can include irritability, hallucinations, hypoxia, anxiety, depression and hyperalgesia, which is an increased response to pain. ere are also additional factors that increase the risk of an opioid overdose such as poor health, purchasing from the black market, history of substance use disorder and using di erent sources of drugs, according to Simbeye.

However, recent discharge from incarceration or any kind of institutionalization for previous users increases their chance for an overdose if they choose to use again as their tolerance for the drug decreases.

“ ey may not recognize that their tolerance has decreased and they are likely to use at the same amount that they used before going into that institutional setting,” said Simbeye.

“ ey are highly susceptible to overdosing because now their respiratory system doesn’t have the same high tolerance and it’s going to be overwhelmed and suppressed to the point of not breathing.” e other high risk factor is taking opioids in combination with any other drug, speci cally benzodiazepines, Valium and Xanax for example. Any kind of anti-anxiety drug combined with opioids is 10 times more likely to have an overdose because of how the drugs interact with one another, said Simbeye. ree indicative signs of an overdose are shallow or slow breathing, also known as the “death rattle”, lips and nails turning blue and loss of consciousness.

In the event that an individual is overdosing, it is important to under-