Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opiate, used in the medical field, but whose use is diverted as a drug. Originally, it was a medicine manufactured and exported from China.
Diverted by Mexican cartels, it is sold in the form of a highly addictive blue pill labeled M30. In San Francisco, the number of overdoses due to fentanyl increased by 279% between 2016 and 2021, according to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.