Law enforcement officials in a Massachusetts town are the latest to issue a warning over the fatal risks of fentanyl-laced cocaine, which is increasingly a culprit in overdose deaths.
The fire chief of Lowell, Mass., released a statement last week about a surge in overdoses involving both cocaine and fentanyl, a synthetic opioid roughly 30 to 50 times more powerful than pure heroin. Fred Ryan, police chief in Arlington, Mass., said this week that between December and January their town experienced at least four fentanyl overdoses among people who thought they were doing cocaine, reported WBUR.
“Law enforcement tells us that the next wave of the addiction crisis is fentanyl-laced cocaine,” said Ryan, according to WBUR.
The opioid epidemic is battering Massachusetts, claiming 1,977 lives in 2017. Officials fear those deaths will surge as fentanyl continues to infiltrate non-opioid drug supplies. Massachusetts State Police say they saw a three-fold increase in the number of cocaine samples testing positive for fentanyl in 2017 compared to the previous year.
“We heard about it slowly…and now it’s here,” said Jess Tilley, co-founder of HRH413, a harm reduction group training people to use drug testing kits and Narcan, according to WBUR. “We don’t want to cause widespread panic, but with how deadly fentanyl is, we really need to get the word out there that it could potentially be in every in batch of cocaine, just like we tell everyone to approach heroin like it could potentially have fentanyl.”
Communities across the country are sounding the alarm on the threat the infiltration of fentanyl poses across drug supplies. The Ohio Department of Health recently asked medical professionals and first responders to start using the opioid overdose reversal drug Narcan for any situation where a person has overdosed on drugs in case fentanyl is involved.
Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department officials said at a city council hearing in Florida March 19 that cocaine overdose toxicology reports involving fentanyl are rapidly increasing.
Authorities fear that because cocaine is more widely used as a social drug than a substance like heroin, many users are unaware of the fatal risks even a small amount of the drug now carries.
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Fentanyl overtook heroin as the U.S.’s deadliest substance in 2016, claiming 19,413 lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cocaine-overdose deaths increased from roughly 4,000 in 2009 to more than 6,700 in 2015, the CDC estimates. Cocaine-overdose deaths are about to explode in 2017 to nearly 11,000, National Institute on Drug Abuse officials predict.
Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death for Americans under age 50, claiming more than 64,000 lives in 2016.
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