Deaths from fentanyl in Bulgaria have risen sharply, according to the 2026 report of the European Union Drugs Agency. The synthetic opioid killed more than 100 people in the country in 2024 and 2025.

In 2023, 10 drug users died in Varna after taking heroin mixed with fentanyl.

A man being treated at an addiction centre in Varna has survived fentanyl twice. He has been addicted for 9 years. He started with marijuana at school, then moved to heroin and later to fentanyl.

"One puff of fentanyl put me in a coma for three days. I woke up in hospital with a tube," he told BNT. Doctors intubated him, putting a tube in so he could breathe. His wife says his heart stopped twice.

The second time, he had smoked it in a taxi and woke up in an ambulance, where he was given an antidote, a drug that stops the effect of the opioid. The man says most addicts who take too much fentanyl die from suffocation, so an antidote shot given right away saves lives. Last year, 7 or 8 people he knew died.

As well as addiction, he is fighting depression. He says fighting both at once is harder and more complicated, "a kind of nightmare". Recovery is painful and long.

Pavel Pavlov, head of the "Samo Dnes" ("Only Today") Therapeutic Centre, believes people could be saved far more effectively if the antidote were available, including to ambulance crews. "When it isn't available, and the ambulance crews don't have it either, there is no point splashing these people with water," he told BNT.

Pavlov warns that when people go back to their old surroundings, the addiction starts again at once. He says these are very heavy opioids and a very severe addiction, and the risk to life is very high. Without coordination between the state, psychiatric hospitals and specialist treatment centres, addicts will die, he believes.

The patient from Varna is married and has two children. He hopes to go home clean and start his life afresh, without drugs, with his wife and children.