Law Enforcement Coping with Elephant Tranquilizer ODs

From southern Ohio down to Alabama and increasingly up the Eastern Seaboard, drug users are dying by the scores in a strange new way: by overdosing on elephant tranquilizer.

The drug, called carfentanil, comes from labs in China—usually mailed to users who buy it online or shipped to cartels in Mexico who smuggle it across the southern border—and is 10,000 times more potent than morphine. Federal law enforcement officials across the eastern half of the country told The Daily Beast they have seen an alarming increase in the number of people dying by overdosing on this drug, and that they’re searching for the toughest prosecutorial strategies to try to stop the deaths.