Until a recent spate of fatal overdoses, few Canadians had heard of fentanyl, let alone thought of the the powerful painkiller as a street drug. But police have been warning for some time that the drug is quickly becoming a problem on the streets, as they've watched its deadly toll grow.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are vowing to crack down on the illicit production of the drug, despite the difficult challenge of shutting down clandestine labs and organized crime rings, and a regulatory system that is struggling to keep up.

Sgt. Brent Hill of the RCMP's Chemical Diversion Unit says fentanyl is now in the spotlight because, for many drug users, it's taken the place of increasingly hard-to-obtain oxycodone, while also offering recreational drug users a new high.

“It's just an evolution that drug producers have brought to the table,” Hill told CTVNews.ca.

Some drug users specifically seek out fentanyl, but others don’t even know they’re taking it. Drug producers are cutting it into other drugs -- most often “fake oxy,” a synthetic form of oxycodone that is popular among both among oxy addicts as well as recreational drug users.

To a drug dealer, fentanyl represents good business because so little of it is needed to give fake oxy a “boost.” The painkiller is 50 times stronger than morphine and even 20 times stronger than heroin, and the profit margin is enormous, says Hill.

“It takes pennies to make a tablet in these labs -- maybe 50 cents -- that they can sell for $10,” or more, he says.

Labs hiding in plain sight

Cracking down on synthetic drug labs is in some ways more difficult than stopping the trade of cocaine or heroin, which arrives in Canada in large shipments from Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere. With fentanyl, most of it is produced right here at home, often quite literally in our own backyards.

Sophisticated pill-pressing labs have been discovered hiding in plain sight in suburban homes, high-rise apartments and commercial buildings, Hill said.

And while police struggle to finding the labs, the RCMP are trying to shut off the chemical supply chain to those operations and going after the distribution channels that bring the precursor chemicals into Canada.

“We're fighting this on multiple levels,” says Hill.

Some of the chemicals used in fentanyl-laced fake oxy and other “designer drugs” are now regulated, so the federal government can keep track of who is ordering them and why. Others are still unregulated.

The problem is that, as soon as governments begin noticing that drug users are using certain chemicals and take steps to regulate them, producers can simply change their formulas.

“The recipes are forever evolving. The drug trafficker will adapt to legislation,” says Hill.

How chemical companies are helping

It all leads to a cat-and-mouse game in which drug rings are often two steps ahead of regulators. But the RCMP’s Chemical Diversion Unit has had success in bringing chemical and pharmaceutical companies on board to help.

These companies are asked to alert police when they spot unusual requests for chemicals they suspect are being diverted to the drug trade. Hill estimates they receive 20 tips a month from such companies that police then follow up on and investigate.

The chemical companies are usually keen to help the RCMP with this surveillance, because they have a vested interest.

“They want to protect their corporate image, because no one wants to hear that their chemicals were found in a drug lab,” he says.

Canadians can help, he says, by also reporting suspicious activity in their neighbourhoods. The labs themselves can be highly dangerous, Hill says, since the kinds of people who work in them have little understanding of what they’re doing.

“These are unskilled, untrained cooks. These are not chemists. When things go wrong, you have explosions and fires with tragic results," says Hills.

Then there’s the public expense of dismantling labs. Health Canada drug inspectors need to be summoned to test the chemicals, certified waste disposal teams must remove the chemicals and equipment, which then need to be stored in an evidence locker while police complete their investigation.

When it’s over, Hill estimates, it can cost between $5,000 and $100,000 to dismantle a single lab.

“When you look at the costs that face the average taxpayer from these places, you just shake your head,” he says.

And of course, there is the human cost of fentanyl.

Drug users are dying because the pill makers are concerned more with profit, than a safe product. Dosages can vary from pill to pill, and batch to batch and users have no way of knowing what they’re getting with each pill.

Hill says it drives him crazy to hear after a number of overdose deaths people blaming a “bad batch."

"It's not a 'bad batch' because there is never a 'good' batch of this stuff,” he says. ”These are not skilled chemists. Nothing good comes out of this.”