Iso Chinese Quotes

In August 2018 a drug I’d never heard of was discovered, having killed a person who overdosed near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The drug was called isotonitazene—an opioid first synthesized in the 1950s that hits the same brain receptors as fentanyl. Iso—as it’s now known on the streets—then was found in dozens of corpses in Chicago and Milwaukee, and from there it spread to Michigan, Indiana, Tennessee, killing at least 230 people in all. Researchers believe it may be marketed by Chinese chemical labs as a replacement for fentanyl, which the Chinese government banned in 2019. In April 2020 isotonitazene seemed to fade, only to be replaced by another synthetic opioid, brorphine. Brorphine showed up in the corpses of 130 people in many of the same states. At least seventeen new synthetic drugs were identified in 2020 alone. The day I turned in my manuscript, another opioid was found on the rise, metonitazene. “It’s almost as though they’re market testing,” said Barry Logan, chief forensic scientist at NMS Labs, which does bodily fluid tests for coroners nationwide. Underground chemists seemed to be searching the chemistry literature for drugs that might be molecularly modified to be more potent. Then, like Paul Janssen did when he invented fentanyl, “they’re experimenting,” Logan said. “They’re changing the molecule’s [structure], which changes how rapidly it’s taken up into the brain. Then they put it out there on the market.