The June 28 release of the 2016 DEA National Heroin Threat Assessment addresses the emerging scope of the synthetic opioid threat—particularly from fentanyl, a drug that significantly escalates the current devastating heroin and prescription opioid abuse outbreak. Fentanyl and its analogues, lethal synthetics that are variously reported as 40 to as much as 80 times more potent than heroin, are killing people at an alarming rate.

The DEA notes that overdose deaths from these synthetics increased 79 percent between 2013 and 2014 alone. These enormously profitable drugs, produced in clandestine labs, are used to spike heroin potency, and are increasingly found in the form of counterfeit prescription pills.