Authorities arrested two men who were running a pill mill for painkillers mixed with fentanyl out of their garage in a suburban neighborhood in Long Island.
Agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration knocked in the door of a residence in West Babylon, N.Y., Wednesday night, catching two men in the act of using a press to create pills made of fentanyl. Fentanyl is an often deadly painkiller roughly 30 to 50 times stronger than the average batch of heroin, reports CBS New York.
Authorities arrested Frankie Morano and Daniel O’Neal and charged the pair with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl.
The men were found in the garage wearing full hazmat suits. Agents said the pair made and distributed hundreds of fake pills in the area. Neighbors said they did not suspect anything, but noted they rarely ever saw the two men, who were recent additions to the community.
“It was pretty crazy, right behind our house,” Patty Adamo, a neighbor, told CBS New York. “I never suspected, I saw them out there barbecuing, and they waved to us, and we waved back and that was it.”
Fentanyl is blamed as the primary driver of the spike in opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. since 2010 and even more deadly synthetic replications are appearing in increasing numbers on the street.
The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) identified fake yellow pills branded as Percocet in early June that sparked several deaths and dozens of overdoses. After rigorous testing, scientists found a little known synthetic opioid called cyclopropyl in the pills. The Georgia crime lab conducted a study in May that found more than 450 counterfeit pills containing fentanyl were recently sold on the streets in the state.
Workers at New Jersey’s Office of Forensic Sciences have identified cases of carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer and fentanyl analog roughly 10,000 stronger than morphine. Other potent analogs including acrylfentanyl and tetrahydro fentanyl have also been identified in crime labs in Georgia, Illinois and New Jersey.
Drug overdoses are now the number one cause of accidental death for Americans under 50. The New York Times recently culled through data from state health departments and county medical examiners and coroners, predicting there were between 59,000 and 65,000 drug deaths in 2016.
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