A new and deadly narcotic is making it's way into Alberta, that can cause major health issues or worse.

Fentanyl, created as a breakthrough medication for cancer patients or anyone dealing with long term severe pain to help curb their pain, is now being mixed with numerous gateway drugs to enhance someone's impairment.

But the drug becomes so powerful when mixed with drugs like oxycontin and heroin.

RCMP Constable Martin Gaudet says Fentanyl is drug that shouldn't used for recreational use.

"It's basically 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, which is why it becomes so highly addictive so quickly."

Fentanyl has been linked to an number of tragic deaths or severe brain injuries to users.

The drug has the power to slow down one's heart rate and breathing becomes more difficult, and other drugs like heroin have fentanyl in them it tends to counter balance the effects they have on the human body.

Gaudet says the mass effects of overdosing on fentanyl can include going into a coma where the brain damage is permanent.

"Fentanyl is also seen as a depressant," he says. "So instead of one piece of drug that's lowering your heart rate, making you dizzy or less being able to feel or tolerate those things, you're getting two (two different drugs), which are simultaneously working, and that's where we see people slipping into comas and dying is because it acts as a breathing or respiratory depressant and basically your heart stops and your lungs stops."

Gaudet says the fentanyl that's being used right now isn't the drug that is created within a medical lab.

"Whether it would be cocaine or heroin, marijuana or oxy (oxycontin), you are generally not buying something that has been prescribed and created in a lab," he says. "It is being made by somebody in a garage, in a shop, in their own little warehouse and the exact ingredients that are going into whatever your drug of choice is are not going to be clinically tested."

It only takes the amount of the equivalence of two grains of table salt to have an effect.

The increase in the amount of fentanyl coming into Alberta is extreme that all major city centres are turning their main focus to that drug to get it off the street before more deaths can occur.

Gaudet said the drug hasn't made it's way into the community yet because it is still very new but the larger Western Canadian cities like Vancouver and Calgary are starting to see it more and more.

Fentanyl has been the cause of 145 deaths in Calgary so far this year alone.