It was first developed in a Canadian lab more than three decades ago, promising and potent — and intended to relieve pain in a less addictive way.

Labelled W-18, the synthetic opioid was the most powerful in a series of about 30 compounds concocted at the University of Alberta and patented in the U.S. and Canada in 1984.

But no pharmaceutical company would pick it up, so on a shelf the recipe sat, the research chronicled in medical journals but never put to use. The compound was largely forgotten.

Then a Chinese chemist found it, and in labs halfway around the world started developing the drug for consumers in search of a cheap and legal high — one experts say is 100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 stronger than morphine.

And now it has come to North America — a fact that has scientists and police warning that the already deadly impact of designer opioids could get much worse.

“It’s a king hell of a molecule,” said University of Alberta neuroscientist Bill Colmers. “I think this is basically quite evil.”

The substance first surfaced in Canada last August, when Calgary police seized fentanyl pills containing traces of the drug. Then more than a kilogram of W-18 was discovered in the home of a Florida man, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling fentanyl from China, reported the Sun Sentinel. He faced no charges for possessing the W-18, however, because it’s not yet illegal in the U.S. or Canada.

And just last week, Health Canada’s drug analysis service confirmed that four kilograms of a chemical powder seized in a fentanyl investigation in December 2015 were indeed the dangerous W-18 drug.

Two to 20 micrograms of fentanyl per kilogram of body weight make up a typical dose, but mere nanograms — billionths of gram — of W-18 might give an equivalent high, Colmers said. “It means making extremely accurate dilutions to get your dose … which is really difficult to do,” Colmers said. “These street guys that are cutting it have no clue.”

Rogue chemists are mailing W-18 — readily available on Chinese websites — to North American postal codes in powder form, said Calgary police Staff Sgt. Martin Schiavetta. Wholesalers then mix the pure powder with binding agents in a “tumble dry” and put the concoction through a pill press, yielding a dangerously inconsistent final product, he said.

Schiavetta offered up a baking analogy: “Each cookie will have a different number of chocolate chips, and it’s the same with W-18,” he said. “Fentanyl is already killing people in the hundreds in western Canada, and now there’s this.”

Illicit use of fentanyl was blamed for 655 deaths across Canada between 2009 and 2014, a figure that is likely an underestimate, said Staff Sgt. Pierre Blais with the Alberta elite policing squad, ALERT.

The drug “isn’t nearly as dominant as fentanyl … It’s brand new, but may come more to the forefront,” he said.

Health officials are concerned for many reasons. There are currently no clinical tests to detect the drug in a person’s blood or urine, according to Colmers, making it difficult for doctors to help someone who might be overdosing.

Its effect on humans is largely unknown because W-18 was only ever tested on lab mice.

“The uncertainty of it all is what frightens me more than anything,” said Dr. Hakique Virani, a public health and addiction specialist at the University of Alberta’s faculty of medicine.

“We’re not sure how it behaves in human beings.”

Police and government authorities in Alberta have taken criticism for their handling of designer opioids. ALERT waited a month after the December seizure before sending in the then-unknown W-18 substance for lab testing this year. Health Canada took roughly three months to come back with test results this month. And Alberta Health delayed warning the public for six days after learning about the health risk earlier this month, the Globe and Mail reported.

“We’ve not done as good a job as we should have,” Virani said.

Ontario Provincial Police and Toronto police say no W-18 seizures have been made across the province or in Toronto.

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Health Canada says it is working to have W-18 added as a schedule one drug, like heroin and cocaine, under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. ALERT noted it is working with local police agencies and the Alberta health department to monitor the problem and reduce demand.

The debut of W-18 also draws attention to the growing influence Chinese chemists have on the kinds of drugs entering the North America. Last fall, China banned 116 different synthetic drugs, according to reports, including fentanyl and flakka, a drug that put Florida in crisis mode beginning late 2014. Since the ban, flakka has all but disappeared.

In its absence, however, Chinese drug manufacturers began producing alternatives to sell, including W-18, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency spokesman told the Calgary Sun.

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