A substance used to tranquilize elephants that is
100 times more potent than the drug that killed Prince is hitting the
streets, adding to a growing problem linked to the exotic and toxic sedative, reported the Washington Post.
In recent weeks, police departments across the
country announced carfentanil-related fatalities, including Maryland, Illinois, Colorado,
Wisconsin and Minnesota. Law enforcement officials fear the growing lethal
overdoses tied to the synthetic opioid marks a new normal in the nation’s
heroin epidemic.
“We have never seen death like we do now,” said Tom
Synan, head of Hamilton County Heroin Coalition in Ohio, which was among the
first spots to discover a string of carfentanil deaths during a week in which
the county’s overdoses more than doubled.
“It shows how callous these drug dealers are,”
Synan said. “It has no human use whatsoever and they’re putting it out on the
street and wreaking havoc.”
Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati and
nearly 50 law enforcement agencies, experienced an average of 50 to 70 reported
overdoses a week in early 2016 and four or five deaths, Synan said. One month
after law enforcement learned carfentanil had hit the county, overdoses
skyrocketed with about 175 to 200 calls in a single week in August. Four of
those users died.
The difficult-to-detect substance is so powerful
that an amount equivalent to a few grains of salt can be deadly. It requires
more aggressive treatment to reverse a typical opiate overdose. First
responders are getting burned out answering back-to-back overdose calls rising
because of carfentanil and other synthetic opioids and worry about falling ill
after exposure while answering calls.
And the drug is so new that some medical examiners
don’t have the tools to detect it in autopsies.
Often people don’t know drugs they’ve purchased have
been laced with an elephant sedative that is 10,000 times more powerful than
morphine, leaving their families devastated.
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