Fentanyl, the painkiller officials warn is taking lives

A powerful painkiller being added to street narcotics too boost their potency is killing dozens of Canadian drug users who have little understanding of what they are ingesting.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is often prescribed to cancer patients in severe pain. But drug dealers working in illegal labs have begun synthesizing the drug and adding it to other powders and pills such as fake oxycontin, to boost their potency.

Fentanyl is quick-acting and 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, so an overdose can lead to an almost immediate death.

The drug has been involved in the deaths of dozens of casual drug users in recent years, including a British Columbia teen who died over the weekend from a suspected overdose. Jack Bodie, 17, was taken off life support Sunday after collapsing in a Vancouver park Saturday night.

According to the Vancouver Police Department, he and another teen has consumed “fake 80's" in the park, which are fake oxy pills with the number 80 stamped on them.

Bodie's parents are speaking out because they feel compelled to bring attention to the negative effects of the drug.

"(We've been) thinking, what could we have done different … so if we could help somebody to prevent it from happening to them," Barb Bodie told CTV News.

Bodie's father, Mark, said he is concerned that fentanyl is being mixed in with other street drugs.

"This fentanyl is being infused into a whole bunch of drugs that are attractive to all types of demographics," said Mark Bodie.

Bodie's death follows another suspected fentanyl overdose that claimed the life of a 31-year-old North Vancouver man on Friday.

And last week, the B.C. Coroners Service confirmed that a young North Vancouver couple, Hardy and Amelia Leighton, had died after ingesting toxic levels of fentanyl in combination with other drugs. The couple, who had a two-year-old son named Magnus, were found dead in their home after taking the pills together.

The B.C. Coroners Service says there has recently been a spike in the number of fentanyl deaths. While there were just 15 deaths from fentanyl in 2012; that soared to 75 in 2014. So far this year, at least 55 people in the province have died from the drug.

British Columbia is not the only province seeing a spike, as fentanyl has been linked to a growing number of drug overdose deaths in just about every province of Canada.

Police and health authorities say that, in most cases, the victims are not hard-core drug addicts but teens and adults who use drugs only occasionally.

Regina-based drug and alcohol counsellor Rand Teed says fentanyl-containing pills and powders are typically manufactured in illicit labs, where there is no quality control. These labs can produce pills with levels of fentanyl that vary from batch to batch, and even from pill to pill.

He said there's no way to tell just by looking which pills will contain lethal doses.

"That's the problem. You have absolutely no idea what you're getting in what you're taking," he told CTV News Channel Tuesday. "When you buy something on the street, you really don't know from one day to the next what's in whatever you're taking."

Earlier this year, the Vancouver Police Department teamed up with several provincial health service authorities to launch a website called KnowYourSource.ca to warn the public about the dangers of fentanyl-laced drugs.

The site notes that fentanyl is being sold not only in pill form as fake oxy’s, it's also turning up in in powdered heroin, or mixed into powder cocaine and crystal meth.

The website advises people who do choose to use illicit drugs to never use drugs alone, and to start with only a small amount to monitor the effects. As well, they advise learning about naloxone, a medication that can reverse an overdose.