Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department held a news conference Wednesday to bring awareness of the dangers of fentanyl.
The drug is a painkiller much like morphine but, according to the National Institutes of Health, it is about "50 to 100 times more potent" than morphine.
“Fentanyl is still as dangerous as it ever was and it will kill you very very quickly," said CMPD Lt. Sean Mitchell. "As little as two milligrams of this stuff will cause you to die.”.
With drug overdose deaths on the rise in the United States, Mitchell says many of them are related to fentanyl.
“Last year was a record year in overdose deaths," Mitchell said. "There were 107,000 deaths nationwide. In Charlotte, we had 213 deaths and 88% of those were tied to fentanyl.”
So far in 2022, there have been 90 suspected overdose deaths and 37% are tied back to fentanyl.