It's a cold winter night in Paterson, New Jersey. There's still snow on the ground from yesterday's storm, and on a corner, under the neon lights of a liquor store, a group of people are gathered. Some are homeless, many are opioid users, and most have had brushes with death. "I just lost a good friend of mine right now. It hurts", says Rob De Maria. A boyish young man, dimples and dark undereye circles, he says he lived out here for two years while addicted to opiates. He's now tapering off, he says it got too scary for him. In part, because of fentanyl, the potent, cheap synthetic opiate that street drugs in the US are being cut with. "It's killing people, left to right. Every day people dropping. Every time they get high I'm pretty sure it's in the back of their heads. That's why they don't get high alone."
Over 110 thousand people died of drug overdoses last year in America, according to the CDC. Behind the deadly wave, is fentanyl, a cheap and powerful synthetic opiate that is often mixed with street drugs. The rise in overdoses is happening across the country. In Virginia, overdoses are now the leading cause of unnatural death. In Los Angeles last year, fentanyl was believed to be behind a wave of teenage deaths.
