The weaponisation of fentanyl
This blog posting is an extract from The Drugs Do Work… [PDF] published in CBRNe World (January 2025).
Fentanyl is a powerful analgesic belonging to the class of fully synthetic opioids. Its main application is in the pain management of cancer patients and people recovering from major surgery. Paul Janssen, a Belgian pharmacologist focussing his early laboratory research on antispasmodics, anaesthetics and other pain relief medication, initially synthesised fentanyl in 1959 derived from structure–activity relationship studies of pethidine, a member of the phenylpiperidine class of fully synthetic opioids. Thirty years before, German researchers had first prepared pethidine (also known as meperidine or under its commercial name Demerol) as an anti-cholinergic agent, but soon discovered its analgesic properties and proposed it as an alternative to morphine as a way to circumvent the opiate’s many adverse effects, including chemical dependency. Pethidine had about one-eighth of morphine’s potency; fentanyl’s is more than a hundredfold. Janssen and his team at Janssen Pharmaceutica synthesised carfentanyl in 1974 and introduced it as a veterinary tranquilliser. The fentanyl analog is 10,000 times more potent than morphine.
In April 2019, the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia published an editorial labelling carfentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. The author, Steven Shafer, calculated that its lethality far outstrips of a 250-kiloton thermonuclear bomb: about 10,000 people per kilogram of bomb mass versus 20 million lethal doses for 1 kilogram of carfentanyl. He was not arguing that a country had turned carfentanyl into a most pernicious chemical weapon (CW). He was referring to the fast spread of fentanyl and its analogs as a narcotic and the exponential rise in fatalities from the opioids’ abuse, especially since 2015.
Nonetheless, fentanyl is already being weaponised as a so-called incapacitant chemical agent (ICA), presently termed a central nervous system (CNS)-acting agent. During the storming of the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow, in which Chechen terrorists held more than 900 hostages, Russian special forces pumped carfentanyl and a second analog, remifentanyl, into the building. The opioids were responsible for the deaths of 132 hostages.
In the past months, two US institutes published papers accusing Iran of running a fentanyl-based CW armament programme (one by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at the US Military Academy in Westpoint in October and two by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in November and December). Israel denounced Iran’s fentanyl programme as a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) at the 29th Conference of the States Parties held during the last week of November 2024.
The recent analyses of Iran’s alleged work on PBAs with the intent to weaponise them reveal a matter of concern that CWC state parties should look into.
However, the argument that these weapons, and therefore Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, pose a grave danger to other states or groups of populations cannot be substantiated. At least, not with the arguments offered in CTC Sentinel. Concerns are elevated to threats and a review of past incidents is used to establish motive on Iran’s part. Recent events involving Israel are then advanced to argue the plausibility of certain scenarios. Even though the author could not have foreseen this, the implosion of the Assad regime early in December 2024 and its ramifications for Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Syria probably make the scenarios even less plausible for the time being.
The two ISIS analyses underpin the causes for concern. The CWC foresees in ways to address compliance concerns and, perhaps except for bilateral consultations in line with CWC Article IX, 2, these have not yet been fully exploited. The difficulty with targeting Iran on the matter of CNS-acting chemicals is twofold.
First, the launch of the war on terror by the Bush-Cheney administration has allowed many of the US rivals and adversaries to launch counter-terrorism operations of a highly dubious nature. Counter-terrorism can be – and has been – argued as a set of law enforcement operations. Second, the CWC has defined neither law enforcement nor CNS-acting chemicals. Any comparison with domestic riot control (CWC Article II, 9(d)) and riot-control agents (CWC Article II, 7) does not hold.
This is the loophole Russia was able to exploit when pumping fentanyl derivatives into the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in 2002. Russia does not accept the General Purpose Criterion and argues that the prohibition applies only to chemicals listed in one of the three CWC schedules. Hence, it feels no need to declare any CNS-acting agents (which it has to do for RCAs) it keeps in store for counter-terrorism operations. There is no indication that Iran thinks along similar lines, but in view of elements put forward in the ISIL reports, it cannot be excluded either.
The first steps for resolving the matter is for the OPCW – that is, the community of state parties – to define or clarify CNS-acting chemicals and law enforcement. No easy task, but it is an inevitable one if the organisation wishes to succeed in its aim to prevent the (re)emergence of CW.
