When Eddie Frasca was shooting up heroin, he occasionally sought out its more potent, lethal cousin, fentanyl.
“It was like playing Russian roulette, but I didn’t care,” said Mr. Frasca, 30, a carpenter and barber who said he had been clean for four months. When he heard that someone had overdosed or even died from fentanyl, he would hunt down that batch.
“I’d say to myself, ‘I’m going to spend the least amount of money and get the best kind of high I can,’ ” he said.
Fentanyl, which looks like heroin, is a powerful synthetic painkiller that has been laced into heroin but is increasingly being sold by itself — often without the user’s knowledge. It is up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and up to 100 times more potent than morphine. A tiny bit can be fatal.
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