How Fentanyl and Other Opioids Affect The Brain

What is Fentanyl?

Fentanyl is synthetic morphine. Fentanyl, heroin, morphine, and certain types of prescription pain medications all belong to the same class of opioid drugs.

Originally developed as a surgical anesthetic in the 1960s, fentanyl began to be used as a medication for severe pain management in the 1990s. The most common legal medical administration of fentanyl for pain management is by transdermal patch or sublingual spray.

Fentanyl can be 100 to 10,000 times more powerful than morphine, depending on how it is produced.

How Does Fentanyl Affect the Human Brain?

Fentanyl is designed to efficiently cross the blood-brain barrier, which results in an almost immediate analgesic (pain reduction), euphoric, and sedative effect.

The chemical structure of fentanyl allows it to cross the blood-brain barrier at 100x the rate of morphine. It is this combination of fast-acting effect and concentrated dosing that makes fentanyl an extremely powerful — and dangerous — narcotic.

Fentanyl Binds to Opioid Receptors Throughout the Brain & Body

Once inside the brain, fentanyl binds strongly to mu-opioid receptors in the spinal cord, brain stem, and areas of the brain involved with pain perception, motivation, learning, and reward processing: