The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a rare public alert – its first since 2015 – warning that pain medication bought on the black market is increasingly laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl or the stimulant methamphetamine.

“We are in the midst, in my view, of an overdose crisis, and the counterfeit pills are driving so much of it,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told The Washington Post.

“We decided to do this because the amounts are staggering,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in an interview with @washingtonpost “We are in the midst, in my view, of an overdose crisis, and the counterfeit pills are driving so much of it.” Read more https://t.co/7LE6oYedbC

— DEA HQ (@DEAHQ) September 27, 2021

93,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, a record number that represents a 30% increase over 2019’s death toll. Comparatively, 38,680 Americans died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2020.

Fentanyl is a powerful chemical sedative used to treat patients in extreme pain, often after surgery. It is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

Appearing on ‘TODAY‘ to promote the DEA’s ‘One Pill Can Kill‘ campaign, Milgram explained that many pills marketed online as Oxycodone, Percocet or Adderall are often laced with other, more powerful drugs.

Milgram warned: “It’s Russian roulette, but it’s even more dangerous in one sense. In Russian roulette, people know that they’re passing around a loaded gun. Here, you are talking about many people who think that they are actually buying…a prescription drug…And they’re not. They’re buying fentanyl or methamphetamine. And the fentanyl pills can kill people.”

Anne Milgram, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, is launching a campaign, “One Pill Can Kill,” to warn about illegal synthetic pills being sold online as prescription drug. @tvkatesnow has the details. pic.twitter.com/2KhltIEEJ7

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) September 27, 2021

The DEA has seized nearly 10 million counterfeit pills this year. The number of seized counterfeit pills found to contain fentanyl has jumped 430 percent since 2019, reports The Post.

“There’s no question in my mind right now there are chemicals largely coming from China to Mexico, where the cartels are mass-producing fentanyl and meth and now increasingly seeing them pressed into pills,” Milgram told The Post.

The Post adds:

“The drug dealer isn’t just standing on a street corner anymore,” Milgram said. “It’s sitting in a pocket on your phone.” She added that many of the counterfeit pills that alarm the agency are being sold on sites such as Snapchat and TikTok.

“Social media is not doing enough to deal with this,” she said, while emphasizing that the first priority is warning the public. “We have not gone to them yet with specific demands, but we will at some point go to them.”