Law enforcement seizures of illicit fentanyl increased dramatically in number and size between 2017 and 2023 in the United States, especially in pill form, according to a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
The number of individual pills containing fentanyl seized by law enforcement was 2,300 times greater in 2023 compared with 2017, with 115,562,603 pills seized in 2023 versus 49,657 in 2017. The proportion of fentanyl