Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that’s 50 to 100 times more powerful than heroin, and is causing a growing number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. In fact, with other synthetic opioids, fentanyl has been connected to about a third of the 64,000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2016.

But very often, drug users don’t even know there’s fentanyl mixed into the drug they are about to inject. But there is a way they can find out: A test strip. 

"If you had a little bit of the drug you could pop in here...you would add a little bit of water… and then you use this test strip, hold it in, and if there was fentanyl present, two red lines or pink lines would appear," says Mark Townsend. He works for a needle exchange program in New York City, and his team regularly distributes these testing strips to the community.

But Townsend says, just because users know about the dangerous drug's presence, it doesn't necessarily mean they won't use.

“People have come to me and said, 'Well I tested and it was positive,' but people are in such desperate straits, they would use this even if it tests positive, pretty much.”

So once someone finds out that their sample contains dangerous fentanyl, what to do with that information? And how important is a tool like this in the face of the opioid crisis?

The Takeaway puts that question to Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of Law and Health Sciences at Northeastern, whose work focuses on drug policy. 

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This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich