![]() | Europe has a growing market for the opioid painkillers that have caused a deadly drug epidemic in Canada and the US. Fentanyl is driving an increase in the number of deaths from drug overdoses on the continent, crime agency Europol says. Europol says 8,441 died from a drug overdose in 2015 - the latest year for which figures are available - up by more than a thousand two years earlier. There have been 24 different fentanyl analogues found on Europe’s drug market over the last five years, with 14 of them discovered since January 2016. Latest figures show US drug overdose deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids hit 20,145 in 2016, double the number from a year earlier. |