Police Seize Enough Fentanyl "To Kill Half Of NYC" In Recent Bust

The opioid crisis is killing tens of thousands of Americans a year as powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl are increasingly mixed in with the heroin supply, killing unsuspecting addicts in greater numbers. These lab-manufactured opioids and their pharmacological cousins are so powerful, a 20-pound mixture of fentanyl and heroin that was recently seized by law enforcement was said to contain enough of the narcotic to kill half of New York City’s 9 million residents, according to one Drug Enforcement Administration agent who spoke with Consumerist.

The drugs were taken when DEA agents busted a heroin mill operating out of an apartment across the street from Central Park. Police arrested four men, including one who was posing as an Uber driver, for their alleged involvement in the drug-distributing ring.

According to NYC’s department of Health and Mental Hygiene, fentanyl – which is 50 times more potent than heroin - is driving a spike in fatal overdoses, which reached an all-time high of 1,374 deaths in 2016, a 46% increase over 2015. Nationwide, the rate of drug-related deaths per 100,000 people peaked at 19.7 during the third quarter, up from 16.7 during the same period a year earlier, according to government data released Tuesday. The increase was driven largely by opioids, specifically fentanyl, carfentanil and other synthetics. Deaths from drug overdoses in the US are believed to have surpassed the 60,000 mark last year.

“Fentanyl is the deadliest street drug to ever hit this country,” said DEA Special Agent-in-Charge James J. Hunt. “This seizure alone contains enough potency to kill half of the population of New York City, if laboratory analysis proves it is all fentanyl. Fentanyl is manufactured death that drug dealers are mixing with heroin.”

Here’s an account of the bust, courtesy of Consumerist:

“DEA agents were conducting surveillance near the building on Central Park West on Aug. 4 when they saw one defendant leaving with two boxes inside a large shopping bag. He got into a vehicle driven by another defendant, an Uber driver, with agents following behind.

Investigators stopped the vehicle, and observed the suspect sitting in the backseat with two boxes: One box was open and they could see a clear plastic bag containing a tan powdery substance inside.

After looking more closely at that box — the larger of the two — investigators say they also saw six large cylindrical packages wrapped in tape and plastic wrap.

And in the smaller box, officials spotted a large cylindrical package wrapped in tape and plastic wrap, and a clear plastic bag containing a tan powdery substance.

Agents seized the packages, and arrested both the Uber driver and the passenger. Meanwhile, investigators kept watching the building, and eventually observed a man previously identified as a member of a drug trafficking organization exiting with another man. When questioned by agents, he said he lived in the building, and admitted to having a gun and drugs in the apartment."

The bust also generated some laughable headlines. According to the Verge, the dealers had branded the some of the packaged heroin with the Uber logo. The drug crew used other corporate logos, like McDonald’s, as well as generic names like “Black Friday.”

President Donald Trump’s Commission on Drug Addiction and Combating the Opioid Crisis urged the president to declare a state of emergency to help combat the crisis. On Tuesday, Trump said the US has “no alternative” but to triumph over the crisis.

The US already has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in the world.

Fed Believes Opioid Crisis Is Reason Why Men Aren't Working

Bill Polacek runs a manufacturing company in Western Pennsylvania. Even though a glut in new construction projects has dried up work for tradesmen, Polacek said he struggled to find qualified welders a few years back when he had a large number of jobs to fill. Polacek interviewed 350 people to fill openings for 50 welders and machinists at his Johnstown, Pennsylvania-based manufacturing company. But he quickly found the number of qualified candidates dwindling to the point where the number of open jobs was higher than the applicants qualified to fill them. The reason? Too many of Polacek’s interviewees either had criminal histories, or couldn’t pass a drug test.

“"We weren’t attracting the right people," Polacek says of the episode, which prompted him to invest in extensive outreach to local high schools to build up a pipeline of workers.”

America’s worsening opioid crisis has helped create a generation of men whose struggles with addiction are preventing them from finding, and holding, steady jobs. Indeed, the type of hard-to-hire Americans Polacek encountered pose a growing problem for many employers, as a deepening opioid crisis plagues American communities just as the jobless rate hovers near a 16-year low. Polacek’s situation is hardly unique; the Fed’s Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes about the business climate collected by the 12 regional Fed banks, has included many testimonials about the difficulty that some employers, particularly manufacturing firms, are having in finding qualified workers, like this one from a manufacturing firm in St. Louis.

“Manufacturing contacts in Louisville and Memphis reported difficulties finding experienced or qualified employees, with some citing candidates’ inability to pass drug tests,” the St. Louis Fed reported in the July 12 Beige Book, a survey of regional economic conditions. Businesses have also raised the issue as a barrier to finding workers in conversations with Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker.

According to Bloomberg, the Federal Reserve has stumbled on an explanation for the phenomenon that Polacek experienced when he tried to hire those welders - a question that has stumped central bankers, policy wonks and academics: Why are so many working-age men are dropping out of the labor force?

Even though this trend started 40 years ago, the Fed says the opioid crisis is now contributing to the problem of shrinking prime-age labor-force participation. The seeds of the opioid crisis were planted in the 1990s as doctors liberally prescribed dangerous painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin. Today, 15%, or one in seven, men between 25 and 54 are inexplicably missing from the workforce, despite the unemployment rate purportedly declining to 4.4% in June.

The opioid crisis began in earnest around the beginning of Obama’s first term in office, as deaths from drug overdoses started to climb. Now, after recording nearly 60,000 drug-related deaths last year, drugs are the biggest killer of prime-age Americans. America has more drug overdose deaths than any other developed country. Many of these deaths are caused by dangerous synthetic opioid analogues like fentanyl and carfentanil, the latter of which is 100% stronger than morphine.

And it’s not just Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who was asked several questions about opioids during her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last week, who’s trying to connect the dots between opioids and the surfeit of unemployable, shiftless young men: At the Cleveland Fed’s summit, talk about the crisis wasn’t reserved for the opioid-specific panel: it came up throughout the other sessions, according to Bloomberg.

“It’s an economic issue. It has economic implications, but it’s a whole lot more than that,” Petrus said. “It’s cross-cutting.”

Many other notable academics, including Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, have published economic research about opioids.

The Boston Fed published research in September on the link between local economic despair and opioid use in New England. Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton suggested in their work on rising middle-age mortality among the white working class that the breakdown of traditional economic and social structures have probably contributed to a step up in overdose, alcoholism and suicide.

During her Senate testimony, Yellen explained that opioids were one cause of the drop in prime-age labor force participation, along with increasing automation and outsourcing by manufacturers. However, Yellen says she doesn’t understand whether widespread opioid abuse is a symptom of the “long running maladies” these workers have faced, or the cause.

“There seems to be a clear indication or a clear connection between this and the ability to go to a job,” said Senator Joe Donnelly, to which Yellen agreed.

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse asked Yellen whether mid-career job retraining opportunities might alleviate the problem, as technological innovation forces Americans in certain industries to acquire new skills or be replaced by a machine.

“The individuals who’ve lost those jobs have found it difficult to acquire the skills necessary to re-enter the labor market and many individuals who don’t have the education are struggling to find jobs,” Yellen said, in response.

But while mid-career job retraining sounds plausible – it is a concrete, if wonkish, policy, there’s a broader problem with the labor force that narrowly applicable, resource-intensive “solutions” like these are missing. And that’s the fact that, fundamentally, the number of well-paying jobs available for everyone except the supremely well-educated is shrinking rapidly. Meanwhile, the financial circumstances for the average millennial are much more precarious. Indeed, failure to launch a career during the early years can leave a negative impact for years to come.

While it’s nice to think about, the “everybody should just learn to code” policy won’t fix any of these deeply entrenched problems in the US labor market – and it certainly won’t convince anyone to stop using drugs.
 

Opioids Killed More People In One Ohio County Last Year Than Car Accidents, Homicides, & Suicides Combined

As the national opioid crisis rages in the midwest and along the northern and mid-Atlantic states, Cuyahoga County has reported yet another disturbing statistic about the growing death toll from one of America’s most pressing health crises: Last year, deaths from drug overdoses in the county – the bulk of which were caused by powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl – surpassed deaths from homicides, suicides and car crashes combined.

The county medical examiner’s office in Cuyahoga, which abuts the southern shore of the Ohio River, said the country, which is centered around Cleveland, recorded 666 overdose deaths lasts year.  Officials see no end in sight to the crisis and are projecting deaths to climb in 2017, according to the Cleveland.com.

"What we"ve seen over the beginning of 2017 is it"s getting off to a start that"s worse than 2016," Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Gilson said last week in a news release.

Here’s a rundown of data from the county medical examiner’s office, as compiled by Cleveland.com.

The powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl was a factor in 399 of the 666 overdose deaths reported last year. Prevalence of these synthetic drugs has risen sharply since 2013 when it was involved in just five deaths. Another reason for the spike in deaths is that fentanyl is sometimes being mixed in with other drugs, usually heroin but also sometimes cocaine. The 399 fentanyl deaths reported last year included 117 deaths caused by fentanyl alone and 141 caused by a mix of fentanyl and heroin. Sixty-eight deaths were caused by a mix of fentanyl and cocaine, and 73 were caused by a mix of fentanyl, heroin and cocaine.

Two other powerful fentanyl analogues, Carfentanil and acetyl fentanyl, were responsible for 54 and 43 deaths, statistics show.

Deaths from opioid overdoses are most prevalent among young white males aged 18-24, according to expert who monitor the epidemic. But in Cuyahoga County, opioids are increasingly killing minorities as well. Fentanyl contributed to the deaths of 58 black people last year in Cuyahoga County, up from 25 in 2015. Just five black people were died from fentanyl use in 2014, according to Cleveland.com.

Still, 85 percent of the people killed by fentanyl last year were white.

Although opioid deaths accounted for the bulk of overdoses, cocaine related deaths also rose sharply in 2016.

There were 260 people who died after overdosing on the drug, or on cocaine mixed with other drugs, statistics show.

Cocaine resulted in 115 deaths in 2015; in fact, cocaine-related deaths have not risen higher than roughly 125 at any point in the past decade.

Fentanyl has been involved in the bulk of drug deaths. But heroin and painkillers were also linked to a greater number of deaths.

Opioids, which include heroin and fentanyl, were linked to 557 of the 666 overdose deaths last year in Cuyahoga County.

Overdose deaths worsened in each four-month trimester of 2016, the medical examiner"s office said.

According to the data, the county reported 140 deaths from January through April and 181 from May through August and 196 deaths between September and December.

In 2016, the county reported 475 violent deaths; that included 184 homicides, 172 suicides and 119 fatal crashes. Heroin and fentanyl, by contrast, killed 506.

Drug overdose deaths in the country are projected to increase from 666 in 2016 to 775 in 2017, the medical examiner’s office said. Heroin deaths are projected to drop, but officials are projecting an additional 200 cases involving fentanyl or cocaine.

"We are seeing epidemic levels of drug overdose deaths in this country," medical examiner Gilson told Cleveland.com in a statement. "It"s a big issue."

Cuyahoga is hardly unique; deaths from drug overdoses nationwide surpassed homicides for the first time in 2015 as the epidemic of heroin and opioid related deaths in the US continues to grow amid the dismal failure of the "war on drugs". 

One coroner in Montgomery Country, PA told a local newspaper that the morgue"s freezer is running out of room for bodies because of the high death toll from the epidemic.

President Donald Trump has vowed to combat the crisis, saying that his border wall would help curb the flow of drugs over the border from Mexico. But increasingly, drug dealers are ordering their drugs through websites hosted on the dark web, where fentanyl and other super-powerful synthetic opioids are widely available. These sites connect buyers with labs in China who will mail the drugs to US-based customers in unassuming packages that are difficult for customs to intercept.
 

Drug Overdoses Now The Leading Killer Of American Adults Under 50

The opioid crisis that is ravaging urban and suburban communities across the US claimed an unprecedented 59,000 lives last year, according to preliminary data gathered by the New York Times. If accurate, that’s equivalent to a roughly 19% increase over the approximately 52,000 overdose deaths recorded in 2015, the NYT reported last year.

Overdoses, made increasingly common by the introduction of fentanyl and other powerful synthetic opioids into the heroin supply, are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. And all evidence suggests the problem has continued to worsen in 2017. One coroner in Western Pennsylvania told a local newspaper that his office is literally running out of room to store the bodies, and that it was recently forced to buy a larger freezer.

The initial data points to large increases in these types of deaths in states along the East Coast, particularly Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania and Maine. In Ohio, which filed a lawsuit last week accusing five drug companies of abetting the opioid epidemic, the Times estimated that overdose deaths increased by more than 25 percent in 2016.

In some Ohio counties, deaths from heroin have virtually disappeared. Instead, the primary culprit is fentanyl or one of its many analogues. In Montgomery County, home to Dayton, of the 100 drug overdose deaths recorded in January and February, only three people tested positive for heroin; 97 tested positive for fentanyl or another analogue.

In some states in the western half of the US, data suggest deaths may have leveled off for the time being - or even begun to decline. Experts believe that the heroin supply west of the Mississippi River, traditionally dominated by a variant of the drug known as black tar which is smuggled over the border from Mexico, isn"t as easily adulterated with lethal analogues as the powder that"s common on the East Coast.

First responders are finding that, with fentanyl, carfentanil and the other analogues, overdoses can be so severe that multiple shots of naloxone - the anti-overdose medication that often goes by the brand name Narcan - are needed to revive people. One EMT in Warren County, Ohio told the Times that sometimes as many as 14 doses of Narcan are needed to revive a patient.

“It’s like a squirt gun in a house fire,” the EMT said.

But, as Robert Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch of the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC explains, toxicology results, which are necessary to assign a cause of death, can take three to six months or longer.

“It’s frustrating, because we really do want to track this stuff,” he said.

While the process in each state varies slightly, death certificates are usually first filled out by a coroner, medical examiner or attending physician. These death certificates are then collected by state health departments and sent to the N.C.H.S., which assigns what’s called an ICD-10 code to each death. This code specifies the underlying cause of death, and it’s what determines whether a death is classified as a drug overdose, the NYT reported.

We can say with confidence that drug deaths rose a great deal in 2016, but it is hard to say precisely how many died or in which places drug deaths rose most steeply. Because of the delay associated with toxicology reports and inconsistencies in the reported data, our estimate could vary from the true number by several thousand.

A New Street Drug Can Kill You By Touching Your Skin: What You Need To Know

Authored by Alice Salles via TheAntiMedia.org,

The opioid epidemic is a real tragedy. It has been devastating states like West Virginia, Vermont, and Maine - among others - and it’s been the number one factor in a major incarceration shift that is still seldom discussed by the media.

But as soon as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a new set of national standards for prescribing painkillers, yet another deadly drug threat is beginning to concern authorities in certain states.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu spoke at a press conference this week, warning that a drug that’s 10,000 times stronger than morphine has made its way into the state. As a result, many first responders have been left scrambling to find a way to handle this new threat.

Carfentanil, a powerful new opioid, has already claimed three lives.

Engineered to be used as an elephant tranquilizer, the drug’s lethal dosage is 20 micrograms. Since the product can cause deadly effects just by being sprinkled on someone’s skin, authorities are highly concerned.

Manchester Fire’s EMS Director Chris Hickey is warning New Hampshire residents they must be “hyper, hyper vigilant of what is out there, hyper vigilant of where you put your hands, what you come in contact with.”

“There is nothing out there other than going on in hazmat suits on every single overdose that is going to completely protect us. We just have to be super, super careful with it,” Hickey told his own crew.

The drug is so powerful that first responders are even having a hard time reversing overdoses when they arrive at emergency locations.

On one occasion, Hickey said, one of his men had to use six to eight doses of Narcan, an overdose reversal drug, to revive a victim - twice the dose used in most cases.

As doctors and first responders notice a pattern, they are also warning the public that Narcan isn’t going to be enough from now on. So what is next?

Fear, of course.

As state and local authorities find themselves panicking over this issue, many will ask for tougher laws. Federal agencies will then intervene, adding further restrictions to the already heavily regulated drug market in the United States. Adding fuel to the fire, the drug war will continue to target opioids like heroin and opium while Congress continues the process of imposing strict limits on some opioid prescriptions.

As more restrictions are applied, users will have a harder time gaining access to the substances they are already addicted to, forcing them to turn to the black market for their fix.

With this, incidents like the ones we’re seeing in New Hampshire will become even more common, prompting further government involvement. As this snowballs into further restrictions, the opioid epidemic will reach unimaginable levels, killing a record number of people, making orphans out of countless children, and creating another boom in U.S. incarceration rates.

While it’s easy to understand why locals in New Hampshire are afraid, the rhetoric and reality on the ground should not be used to push for more heavy-handed intervention from local and federal governments. Instead, it’s time to look deep into how the opioid crisis started, keeping in mind that the government’s own fruitless battle against drugs was the very root of what is now concerning New Hampshire authorities.

Like New Hampshire’s Drug Lab Director Tim Pifer, we agree that “this is certainly unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg.” But just like any iceberg, its base lies in dark, cold waters. Unless we’re ready to be honest with ourselves, finding the courage to dive deep to find where it begins, we will never know how huge this problem really is. And if we’re not willing to look at the root of the problem, we won’t be able to find a proper solution.