We Need to Talk About the Fentanyl in Your Party Pills

The potentially deadly substance is virtually impossible to see, smell, or taste and it's creeping into drugs you might have once considered "safe."

- MARA SANTILLI

Jenna* started experimenting with alcohol and weed when she was 18. In her early 20s, she moved on to pharmaceutical drugs like Adderall and oxycodone, popping them while partying or, in the case of meds like Xanax, to self-medicate for anxiety. She didn't have actual prescriptions for any of them, but it wasn't a problem-securing pills was easy at the restaurant where she worked. Someone was always willing to share.

Jenna knew there were risks, of course, as there would be with any recreational drug use, but she rarely had any issues. She was high-functioning and knew her limits. She never had cause to worry about what was actually in the pills she took. "Everything was pretty much what it appeared to be," she says. Plus, she trusted her sources. But today? A totally different story.

"The landscape is so much more nefarious," says Jenna, now 35 and working in harm reduction. "You can't trust anybody to give you what they say they're giving you." As more and more women are coming to realize, it's also nearly impossible to trust the pills themselves. Any obtained on the illicit market (as in anywhere other than a legitimate medical pharmacy) may be laced with illegally made fentanyl, a super-potent synthetic opioid that has been the cause for most fentanyl-related deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These so-called "fentapills" are indistinguishable from the legitimate prescription drugs they're pretending to be (like Adderall, Xanax, Percocet, or oxycodone), explains Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD, MPH, a senior scientist in opioid disorders and overdoses at the University of North Carolina Injury Prevention Research Center.