1 city, 2 days, 52 OD's

The number of opioid dependents rose by 3,000 percent in the last nine years.

Heroin laced with carfentanil, the most potent commercial opioid known to be 10,000 times stronger than morphine, is being dealt on streets across the United States.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to CNN, carfentanil significantly slows breathing and is normally used to sedate elephants.

It only takes two mg to induce sleep for a nearly 2,000 pound African elephant, yet people are injecting the substance into their bodies.

The drug rose to infamy after pop star Prince overdosed on the dangerous opioid earlier this year.

Officials say dealers attempt to get more for their product by stretching their supply. To do this, dealers will cut heroin with fentanyl analogues but refrain from telling their buyers what their drugs are laced with.

The drug supply lasts longer and users get a better high - a win-win for dealers but a deadly risk for addicts.

According to the CDC, more people died from drug overdoses in 2014 than any other year in recorded history.

Sixty percent of those deaths involved the use of opioids. Between 2000 and 2014, nearly half a million people died from drug overdoses and today, 78 U.S. citizens die each day from an opioid overdose.

Irina Koffler, a senior analyst, specialty pharma, at Mizuho Securities USA, told CNBC, "There was [sic] about 300 million pain prescriptions written in 2015."

Koffler reported the United States consumes the majority of the world's opioids and added: "If you include Canada and Western Europe, [consumption of global opioid supply] increases to 95 percent, so the remaining countries only have access to about 5 percent of the opioid supply."

Excluding the illegal purchasing and selling of drugs on the streets, a 2014 study titled "America's Addiction to Opioids: Heroin and Prescription Drug Abuse" explained three other factors that contribute to the severity of opioid abuse are "drastic increases in the number of prescriptions written and dispensed, greater social acceptability for using medications for different purposes, and aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies."

In a CNN report, Andrew Kolodny, a senior scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, explained: "In the past couple of years, we've seen policymakers realize that overprescribing is fueling the crisis. Before that, the focus of federal policymakers was almost exclusively on trying to stop non-medical use" of opioids.

To help fight the rising epidemic, U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016, which will hopefully prevent opioid dependencies and make treatment to help abusers more available.

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