The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made public on Thursday a report according to which 1,013 Americans died after overdosing on an illegal version of the powerful prescription painkiller fentanyl.

The report published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report focused on fatal overdoses from April 2005 to March 2007.

Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opiate analgesic similar but more powerful than morhine. It is typically used to treat patients with severe pain, or to manage pain after surgery. It is also sometimes used to treat people with chronic pain who are physically tolerant to opiates. In its prescription form, fentanyl is known as Actiq, Sublimaze and Duragesic.

When prescribed by a physician, fentanyl is often administered via injection, transdermal patch, or in lozenge form.

According to the report, the fentanyl blamed for the deaths of 1,013 Americans was sold illegally (as a powder) by drug dealers on US streets, often mixed with cocaine and heroin and sometimes used as a heroin replacement. This mixture can have effects such as euphoria, confusion, coma, nausea, tolerance, addiction, unconsciousness, sedation, constipation, drowsiness/respiratory depression and arrest.

Street names for the drug include Apache, China white, China girl, friend, dance fever, jackpot, good fella, Murder 8, TNT, Tango, and Cash.

"One gram of pure fentanyl can be cut into approximately 7,000 doses for street sale. Manufacture of (fentanyl) requires minimal technical knowledge, and recipes for making (fentanyl) are available on the Internet,” the report reads.

Moreover, the drug is 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin, a thing most of the addicted persons didn’t know when trying it for the first time. In fact, the report showed that many of these people were found with the needle still in their arms, not having completed the injection because of the drug’s power.

The highest number of deaths caused by fentanyl overdose were registered in the Chicago area (349), followed by Philadelphia (269), Detroit (230), St Louis, Missouri and the states of Delaware and New Jersey.

The number of deaths began to lower after authorities shut down a fentanyl-making operation n Toluca, Mexico, in May 2006. The fentanyl used in Chicago and Detroit was believed to have come from Mexico.

“I think this is an extraordinary episode of fatal drug overdoses. But it’s got to be recognized as part of the bigger problem of the increasing numbers of drug overdose deaths in the United States,” said retired CDC public health service officer Dr. Stephen Jones, the report’s lead author.

The number of deaths resulted from drug overdoses jumped from 11,155 to 22,448 in 2005, the report reads. What is quite shocking is that powerful painkilling drugs play an important role in these deaths.

This is the worst known outbreak of US fentanyl deaths after that occurred in the 1980s, which included at least 110 fatal overdoses, Jones added.

The number of people dying because of a fentanyl overdose in the US could be higher than that found by the report, which focused only on the cases reported in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and the states of Delaware and New Jersey. “It’s an incomplete picture,” Jones said.