Authorities busted a retired state trooper who was caught trafficking narcotics, including fentanyl and cocaine, during a drug sting in Maine on Wednesday
Agents with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency witnessed 51 year old Jeffrey Linscott delivering the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl to a customer in a supermarket parking lot. Linscott, a 22-year veteran with the state police, was found in possession of several grams of fentanyl, scales, packaging materials and $1,000 in cash from narcotic sales, reports the Press Herald.
Authorities previously purchased drugs from Linscott, including cocaine, during a two month investigation of drug distributors in Cumberland County. The arrest shocked officers who formerly worked with Linscott, saying no one could have seen it coming.
“Jeff was a good trooper, he was a nice guy and this has caught all of us by surprise, but he has turned into a huge embarrassment for the state police,” Michael Edes, who ran the state police union in Maine from 1998 to 2014, told the Press Herald. “For something like this to give us a black eye has made all of us upset.”
Linscott is being held on $50,000 bail and faces charges of aggravated trafficking in fentanyl, trafficking in fentanyl and cocaine, and possession of fentanyl.
Fentanyl, a painkiller roughly 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, overtook heroin as the deadliest substance in the country last year. Deaths from fentanyl and its related analogs more than doubled from 9,580 lives in 2015 to 19,413 lives in 2016, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Opioids claimed 42,249 lives last year, a 28 percent increase over the roughly 33,000 lives lost to opioids in 2015.
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