Dangerous Drug - Fentanyl

IT’S the drug nicknamed “Drop Dead” because just a few grains of the pure product can killyou.
Fentanyl is commonly used in hospitals as a stronger alternative to morphine, but recreational use is spiralling out of control on the streets of America.
The popularity of the highly addictive opiate among addicts is said to have started with a man named George Marquardt, the so-called Walter White of Wichita.
The chemistry prodigy spoke as part of a fusion.net investigation this week, revealing how he started cooking up heroin in his parents’ basement at just 14 or 15 using basic equipment and old textbooks. He quickly gained a reputation, graduating to manufacturing whatever drug dealers requested.
Marquardt spent the 1970smaking ingredients (or precursors) for amphetamines, Mescaline, and LSD.
He was far from ashamed. In 1978, when police raided his Oklahoma lab, he proudly talked them through his
system for making meth, and was sentenced to jail, Newsweek reported. That’s where he first learned about fentanyl, also known as “Tango & Cash”, a drug 50 times stronger than heroin.
By 1989,the science fair winner had learned how to replicate the prescription drug and was essentially
creating a market for it in America, according to fusion.net.
Manufacture was tricky, taking up to 10 days of solid work for one batch, and extremely dangerous, with the drug producing toxic fumes and a risk of explosions.
But Marquardt was making money beyond his wildest dreams. He wasn’t scared of the dealers, because he knew they needed him.
In the early 1990s, Drug Enforcement Agency officers discovered an epidemic of fentanyl overdoses in the northeastern US, with between 126and 300users found dead in a year , some with needles still in their arms, the
Baltimore Sun reported.
Marquardt had made a point of varying the molecular structure of the drug to make it look as though there was more than one fentanyl lab. But eventually it was traced back to his makeshift lab.
Today, former DEA agents say he was no Walter White from Breaking Bad — he was far worse. He has been called the most talented illicit chemist in the history of America, an “evil genius” and a “serial killer.”
The criminal chemist was the only person to ever build his own mass spectrometer, a machine that determines the structures of organic molecules, to ensure the purity of his compounds.
He was sentenced to 25 years behind bars, serving 22 before his release last year aged 69.
The self-taught chemist admitted to fusion.net that he was addicted to the money, and arrest was the only thing that would have stopped him. He never felt guilty.
“It’s, if you will, a kind of a partnership forged in hell, right? And everybody basically knows we’re on the same page in that regard. So I don’t feel like I’m supplying a product to an innocent or naive population.”
But he wouldn’t do it again. “Scares me to death. Too popular.”
In his heyday, Marquardt was a maverick, but now there are perhaps hundreds of illicit labs making fentanyl. Its prescription for anything from chemotherapy to labour pain has helped popularise the drug, and assisted illegal manufacturers in developing their own recipes.
Fentanyl is so potent that it is usually only prescribed outside operating rooms as a slow-release patch — and even then, patients have died from chewing on the patches.
Last year, personal trainer Michael Clayton died on the Gold Coast after applying a fentanyl patch to help relieve his sore muscles. He went to bed and never woke up.
And in 2001, toxicologist Kristin Rossum, who wsa having an affair with her Aussie boss, was convicted of murdering her husband Greg DeVillers in San Diego with fentanyl. He was found dead of an overdose, surrounded by rose petals. Fentanyl was also among the prescription drugs found at Michael Jackson’s home after his death.
Twenty-eight people died of a pure heroin overdose in New Hampshire last year. Nearly 10 times that number overdosed on fentanyl or fentanyl-laced heroin.
The scourge of the US could be coming to a street near you. And you have a new generation of Walter Whites to thank for it.
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George Marquardt began making heroin at 14, then graduatedto super-charged fentanyl. Picture: Fusion TV
The basement chemis