From opium to fentanyl: How did we get here?

Vancouver has always had a drug problem. Only the opioids of choice — and the increasingly staggering death toll — have changed over the years
The Province (Canada)
Saturday, March 18, 2017

When the members of the Royal Commission to Investigate Chinese and Japanese Immigration came to Vancouver in 1901, they got an eyeful. Opium in a smokable form was still widely used in China at the turn of the 20th century and where Chinese workers went, the opium trade soon followed. The fringes of Chinatown have always been the centre of Canada’s opiate trade. Ever more potent and easily smuggled versions emerged through the decades, culminating in the scourge of synthetic opiates — fentanyl and carfentanil — thousands of times more powerful and many times more deadly than opium.