Urgent warning over new drug 100x deadlier than fentanyl that’s shipped from China as police make major bust

Health officials are warning that a drug far more deadly than fentanyl is beginning its tear across the US.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Omaha, Nebraska, in coordination has seized more than 30 pounds of carfentanil, or about 150,000 pills, since November and the drug is appearing in supplies across the country.

Carfentil is a synthetic fentanyl made in a lab and typically used as an elephant and large cattle tranquilizer because it is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than its cousin fentanyl.

Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson said: ‘The most insidious thing about fentanyl and carfentanil is that the cartels press it into facsimile pills to make it look like prescription medication.’

Cartels in Mexico, who typically source chemicals from abroad, typically China, and press them into pills that masquerade as pure benzodiazepines or add them in powder form to heroin and cocaine.

Often, drug users don’t know they’re taking the drug until they begin to overdose. 

The pills seized that would have appeared on the streets had been pressed into fake oxycodone tablets. Officers also found powdered carfentanil, which could be used as an adulterant to cocaine or as an ingredient to press the pills. 

Sheriff Hanson said: ‘Even if 1 percent of those 150,000 pills prove to be fatal, that could’ve meant 1,500 people in Douglas County and in this surrounding area dying of a fentanyl overdose.’

The presence of carfentanil in the illicit drug market began to tick up in 2016. 

But because it’s difficult to tell which fentanyl overdoses were linked to carfentanil specifically, the true toll is hard to determine.

There were 513 overdoses from carfentanil between January 2021 and June 2024, hitting states like Florida and West Virginia the hardest, according to a CDC report published today.

While the overall numbers are low, CDC officials are concerned because the total increase from the summer of 2023 to the summer of 2024 rose more than 720 percent.

Jared Dingwell, supervisor of the halfway house called Men’s Three-Quarter House in Nebraska, said this is not a recent threat to the city: ‘I have multiple residents that are experienced with it. It’s been around for a while. It’s not new.’

From July 2023 to June 2024, nearly 87 percent of carfentanil-related deaths also involved IMF (a dangerous mix of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids like carfentanyl and another analog, acetylfentanyl).

Over that period, carfentanil was found in overdose deaths in 37 states, with eight states—all east of the Mississippi River—seeing at least 20 deaths each.

One of the seizures in Douglas County contained 24 pounds of carfentanil pills, making this one of the largest carfentanil busts in US history.

Seizures of carfentanil and fentanyl, more broadly, are ticking up. Customs and Border Protection reported 22,000 seizures in 2024. There were about 27,000 in 2023 and 14,700 in 2022.

The 2024 seizures were equivalent to more than 377 million lethal doses of fentanyl.

Three months ago, Department of Homeland Security officials intercepted a package at Los Angeles International Airport containing roughly 20 grams of carfentanil (10,000 times the lethal dose) to be delivered to a man in Provo, Utah.

A few grains of salt-worth of carfentanil is deadly, though some reports say a dose of 0.5 mg can prove fatal.

The pills are often disguised as prescription opioids. In the most recent bust in Douglas County, Nebraska, officials collected blue pills stamped with M-30, meant to look like legitimate oxycodone.

The issue of fentanyl trafficking has been at the core of nearly every Trump administration trade and border policy.

The President has attributed his move to place tariffs on Canada and Mexico to the ‘national emergency’ that fentanyl and the cartels have imposed on the US.

The White House announced the tariffs in February: ‘The government of Mexico has afforded safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.

‘This alliance endangers the national security of the United States, and we must eradicate the influence of these dangerous cartels.

White House officials added: ‘There is also a growing presence of Mexican cartels operating fentanyl and nitazene synthesis labs in Canada. A recent study recognized Canada’s heightened domestic production of fentanyl, and its growing footprint within international narcotics distribution.’

President Trump has also floated the idea of targeting Mexico’s leading drug cartel based in Sinaloa and behind a massive share of the pills that cross the border with drone strikes.

Officials from the White House, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies are reportedly considering targeted drone strikes against Mexican drug cartel leaders and operations—but only with Mexico’s approval, according to sources familiar with the discussions who spoke to NBC News. Talks are still in the early stages, and no final decisions have been made.

While a diplomatic approach to Mexico and the drug crisis is the preferred approach, the US has not ruled out acting alone as a last resort. It’s unclear whether American officials have formally proposed drone strikes to the Mexican government.