People Using Illicit Fentanyl Consume Daily Doses Equal to 8,887.55 MMEs

THURSDAY, June 18, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Individuals consuming illicit fentanyl use a quantity of milligrams of morphine equivalents (MMEs) several orders of magnitude higher than clinical guidelines, with a mean estimated daily consumption of 8,887.55 MMEs, according to a study published online June 9 in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Morgan Godvin, from the University of California in Los Angeles, and colleagues examined purity of 509 fentanyl samples collected between September 2023 and January 2026 and estimated the typical daily oral MMEs among 47 respondents who reported regularly using fentanyl.

The researchers found that the mean daily consumption of fentanyl was 1.07 g among the participants. The mean fentanyl purity was 12.47 percent in illicit fentanyl products, and mean estimated bioavailability was 50.82 percent based on routes of administration. The mean estimated intravenous fentanyl to oral morphine MMEs conversion factor was 1 to 183.15. In this sample, the mean estimated daily consumption was 8,887.55 MMEs.

“We find that people are regularly exposed to doses of opioids that would have seemed impossible to me before I started this work,” lead author Chelsea L. Shover, Ph.D., also from the University of California in Los Angeles, said in a statement. “To put it in perspective, in the hospital settings, fentanyl is often dosed in 100 microgram vials. One gram of average purity fentanyl that we tested had a dose equivalent to more than that 1,200 of these vials. So people are getting daily doses that are on par with injecting hundreds of the hospital vials or taking 440 Percocet pills.”

Abstract/Full Text