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W-18 Is Coming to Australia and it's 100 Times More Potent Than Fentanyl

The synthetic opiate has only been around for two years, but Australian Border Force has observing a recent spike in seizures.

Fake oxycontin pills containing W-18, seized last year by Canadian police. Via Twitter.

Officers at the Australian Border Force are growing increasingly concerned by synthetic drug W-18, which is an opiate analogue similar to fentanyl. After several recent seizures on Australian borders, they're warning that it poses a high risk of lethal overdose and that potential users should stay away.

W-18 comes in pill and powder form, and has been on the international drug market for about two years. It's so new that there's no way to test for its presence in the bloodstream yet.

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The heroin-like drug is 100 times more potent than fentanyl—which makes it 10 000 times more powerful than morphine. It produces an intense, painkilling euphoria, assuming the user finds a way to dilute it down into a non-fatal dose. While there have been few proven W-18 overdoses internationally, Fentanyl has been proven to be thoroughly dangerous. In April, VICE Canada reported that around 655 Canadian deaths had been linked to fentanyl between 2009 and 2014. In two US states, fentanyl overdoses were responsible for the deaths of a combined 500 people.

It therefore makes sense that authorities are worried about W-17 and its derivatives. "There are a couple of derivatives out there that don't even have a name yet … chemical analogs known as W, which are even more potent than fentanyl," Border Force boss Roman Quaedvlieg told The Daily Telegraph on Monday.

Quaedvlieg warned that Australia's opiate imports were on the uptake. "We are finding small incidents of fentanyl being seized at the border. It is a highly potent form of opiate which is coming into this country," he said.

In June this year, the ABC reported that a particularly potent batch of heroin was believed to be responsible for 13 drug deaths across Sydney in the space of a month.

W-18 is a relatively new threat, and despite the recent influx of opiates into Australia that the ABF have been dealing with, Quaedvlieg admitted they were nowhere near as much of an issue as the "tsunami of meth" flowing out of South East Asia and into Australia.

"The Chinese authorities who are pushing back against drug production are finding entire villages involved in the production of methamphetamine," he told the Daily Telegraph. "Many of the locals derive their livelihood from being part of the production process. "Primarily the epicentre is the south of China but I have a more expansive view and think the entire Asian continent is involved, particularly around the Mekong.''

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