He fentanyl It has entered with force in all corners of the globe. One of the last countries to appear has been Ecuador, where citizens have been recorded doubling over themselves, as if suffering from an unbearable stomach ache, or writhing as if possessed barefoot in the rain.

The images increase the fear that the so-called zombie drug have entered the country. Fernando Caudevilla, a family doctor who is an expert in drugs, explains that fentanyl is a drug, a “opioid medication approved in Europe and the United States for pain control”, whose main characteristic is its “high potency.

“It is active in the microgram range of a pinhead. As a medicine it is very useful in the treatment of pain, but in North America, and now also in Central America, it is being discovered that is an adulterant of many drugs“, explains Caudevilla.

Drug traffickers are believed to have circulated camouflaged fentanylin other narcotics such as the drug hache or heroin itself. Those who consume it would not even know what they are taking, but the effects it produces on them leave no doubt: acts on the central nervous system producing myclonia (involuntary, brief and rapid movements), daze and unconsciousness.

Fentanyl, global alert

Toxicologists around the world agree that, in recent years, fentanyl spreads across the planet like a true epidemic.

In the United States, in fact, they consider it a real public health problem: It has caused a record of deaths from overdose since it is behind two out of every three deaths from this cause in the country. “In North America, opioid overdose deaths have increased tenfold in the last decade,” adds Caudevilla.

The effects of fentanyl on those who take it are truly dire: get a extreme addiction and rehabilitation, although possible, is tremendously complicated.