Tag: Fentanyl

Fentanyl Officially The Deadliest Drug In America

According to a new report, fentanyl is responsible for more US deaths than any other drug.

Fentanyl has become the most deadly drug in the nation, involved in more overdose deaths than any other illicit substance, according to a new report.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics’ “Drugs Most Frequently Involved in Drug Overdose Deaths: United States, 2011–2016” report, fentanyl was involved in 18,335 overdose deaths last year, far surpassing heroin, the second most deadly drug, which was involved in 15,961 deaths.

Overall, fentanyl was present in 28.8% of overdose deaths in 2016, the report found.

Often, fentanyl was present alongside other drugs, including opioids and cocaine. The prevalence of fentanyl in the opioid supply and now the cocaine supply across the country is striking fear into health care workers and drug users alike, since the powerful synthetic opioid can cause an overdose in tiny amounts. In 69% of the deaths that involved fentanyl, another drug was also found, according to the report.

“We’ve had a tendency to think of these drugs in isolation. It’s not really what’s happening,” Dr. Holly Hedegaard, lead author of the report and injury epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics told The Huffington Post.

Oftentimes, drug users don’t even know they’re being exposed to the drug. This can be particularly problematic for people who don’t typically use opioids and therefore don’t have a tolerance built up. That can leave them more vulnerable to overdose, but participants in one Rhode Island survey said the drug is nearly impossible to avoid.

“It’s like you notice that there’s fentanyl and it’s not the drug you’re going for. It’s like, what’s the point, unless you have a little lab kit or something. That’s the only way you can tell,” a user said.

“I don’t think you can avoid it now,” another user said.

The government report examined overdoses between 2011 and 2016 by looking at the data on death certificates to see which drugs were present in the most deaths. In 2011, fentanyl was the 10th most deadly drug in the country, present in just 1,662 deaths. In 2012 and 2013 it was the ninth most deadly, before moving to the fifth spot in 2014, when it was involved in 4,223 deaths.

By 2015 it was the second most deadly drug, involved in 8,251 deaths, before its impact grew massively in 2016.

“Fentanyl is so deadly, in the geographic regions where it’s been flooding in, deaths soared like we’ve never seen before,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, told CNN.

View the original article at thefix.com

17 December 2018
Trump Calls For China To Use Death Penalty For Fentanyl "Pushers"

“If China cracks down on this ‘horror drug,’ using the death penalty for [fentanyl] distributors and pushers, the results will be incredible!” Trump said on Twitter.

President Trump said that one of the highlights of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is that fentanyl will now be classified as a controlled substance in China, meaning that people who manufacture and distribute the drug could face the death penalty.

“One of the very exciting things to come out of my meeting with President Xi of China is his promise to me to criminalize the sale of deadly fentanyl coming into the United States. It will now be considered a ‘controlled substance.’ This could be a game changer on what is […] considered to be the worst and most dangerous, addictive and deadly substance of them all,” Trump tweeted, according to CNN.”Last year over 77,000 people died from Fentanyl. If China cracks down on this ‘horror drug,’ using the Death Penalty for distributors and pushers, the results will be incredible!”

A release from The White House called the reclassification of fentanyl “a wonderful humanitarian gesture.”

“President Xi… has agreed to designate Fentanyl as a Controlled Substance, meaning that people selling Fentanyl to the United States will be subject to China’s maximum penalty under the law,” the release said.

In China, the maximum penalty is death, CNN reported.

President Trump has in the past praised capital punishment for people who traffic and sell drugs.

“He often jokes about killing drug dealers… He’ll say, ‘You know the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem. They just kill them,’” a senior White House official said in February.

Another source confirmed that.

“[Trump] says that a lot,” the source said. “He says, ‘When I ask the prime minister of Singapore do they have a drug problem [the prime minister replies,] ‘No. Death penalty.’”

While he was campaigning, Trump told a crowd in New Hampshire, a state that has been heavily affected by opioid abuse, that the death penalty should be considered.

“If we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we are wasting our time,” he said. “And that toughness includes the death penalty.”

Trump justified this position by saying dealers “will kill thousands of people during their lifetime” but won’t be punished for these deaths. He said the death penalty would only be used against the “big pushers, the ones who are really killing people.”

Trump has also congratulated Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for his anti-drug campaign that involved killing thousands of people.

“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump said to Duterte in a phone call in 2017. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

View the original article at thefix.com

10 December 2018
French Montana Says He Could Have Saved Mac Miller From Addiction

“If I was around him a couple more nights, I would have made him stop … but he didn’t have nobody that was doing that.”

Hip hop artist French Montana said that he could have stopped rapper Mac Miller’s overdose death by talking to his friend about the way that his drug use was getting out of control.

Speaking on BET’s Raq Rants, Montana said that Miller “was doing the same thing every other artist was doing out there.”

He suggested that if Miller had someone to give him a reality check — or some tough love — the outcome might have been different.

“If you’ve seen the video that me and him did, I’m like, ‘Yo, bro, you’re overdoing it.’ But that was him way before,” he said. “Sometimes if people don’t have people that keep them grounded, it can go left. I just feel like they let him get away with whatever he chooses to do.”

Montana went so far as to say that he could have stopped Miller from abusing drugs and alcohol.

“I feel like I have people that, if I do something like that, how I was to him like a big brother, like, ‘Bro, you’re bugging out.’ … He ain’t have that around him,” Montana said. “Because if I did it that night, if I was around him a couple more nights, I would have made him stop … but he didn’t have nobody that was doing that.”

While Montana might want to believe that he could have helped his friend, anyone with up close experience with addiction knows that facilitating recovery isn’t as easy as just telling someone to snap out of it.

“Substances are incredibly powerful and rewarding,” Kevin Gilliland, a clinical psychologist and executive director of Innovation360 Dallas, told Yahoo Lifestyle. “It’s not as simple as someone saying, ‘You need to stop.’”

Gilliland said that Montana is hinting at some important ways to help people who are dealing with addiction — including keeping them grounded.

“That is often a hugely important piece of helping someone fight addiction, it doesn’t always work,” Gilliland said. “One of the most powerful things I’ve seen for someone getting help for an addiction is having meaningful, significant relationships.”

Talking to someone about their substance abuse and letting them know that you are concerned is a good idea, he added. However, friends and family members have to realize that this doesn’t always work, and that it could make their loved one angry.

“They will get angry and defensive, but you have to talk to them,” Gilliland said.

View the original article at thefix.com

9 November 2018
Mac Miller’s Official Cause Of Death Revealed

The 28-year-old rapper passed away in early August.

A coroner has confirmed Mac Miller’s cause of death. The 26-year-old rapper and music producer (born Malcolm McCormick) died at home in Studio City, California on Sept. 7. Given his history of substance use, early reports pointed to drugs.

On Monday (Nov. 7), the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner confirmed that McCormick had died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, cocaine and alcohol due to mixed drug toxicity.

The rapper, who had a tour planned for October following the Aug. 3rd release of his album Swimming, was discovered by his personal assistant in his bedroom. McCormick “struggles with sobriety and when he ‘slips’ he consumes them in excess,” his assistant said, adding that he’d had “several recent ‘slips’” including one three days prior to his death.

In a 2015 interview with Billboard, the rapper said he was in a good place. “I’m not doing as many drugs. It just eats at your mind, doing drugs every single day, every second. It’s rough on your body,” he said.

Fentanyl, the synthetic opioid painkiller said to be 50 times stronger than heroin, has also been cited in the deaths of Prince (April 2016) and Tom Petty (October 2017). According to the National Center on Health Statistics, fentanyl was involved in 60% of opioid-related deaths in 2017, an 11% increase from five years prior.

While fentanyl was created for cancer pain, it is now fueling rising rates of drug overdose deaths. This has prompted the need for a stronger opioid overdose “antidote” to match the strength of increasingly potent fentanyl analogs.

And this month, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new, more powerful opioid painkiller called Dsuvia. This new drug is said to be 10 times stronger than fentanyl and 1,000 times stronger than morphine.

While Dsuvia is intended for restricted use only in health care settings—the FDA promised to place “very tight restrictions” on the drug—critics worry that it will only worsen the opioid crisis.

“We have worked very diligently over the last three or four years to try to improve the public health, to reduce the number of potent opioids on the street,” said Dr. Raeford Brown, who chairs the FDA advisory committee that voted to approve Dsuvia, despite his opposition. “I don’t think this is going to help us in any way.”

View the original article at thefix.com

7 November 2018
Fentanyl In Cocaine Could Be Unintended

One harm reduction expert thinks cross-contamination may be to blame for cocaine “laced” with fentanyl.

More often, fentanyl is being found in cocaine, increasing the risk of opioid overdose and leaving officials scrambling to figure out why the drugs are being mixed, and if dealers actually intend to combine them.

“It’s something we have to be very concerned about,” Dan Ciccarone, a public health researcher, told Rolling Stone. “[We have] to keep following the data.”

Fentanyl is dangerous enough in the heroin and opioid supplies. However, it is especially deadly for users of cocaine, many of whom do not know what they are ingesting. Because these people are not regular opioid users they have not built up a tolerance to the drug and are therefore more susceptible to overdose.

“Part of the challenge is just how potent fentanyl is that even a small amount, particularly in someone who doesn’t regularly use opioids, can be so deadly,” said Dr. Sarah Wakeman, an addiction medicine physician. “More and more, we’re hearing stories of people who either have only used cocaine and are not a person who uses opioids, or who says ‘I bought what I thought was cocaine,’ and they suffer an overdose and it turns out to be fentanyl.”

To make matters worse, most dealers don’t even realize that their product contains fentanyl. “The street dealers are just as clueless as the users are at this point,” Ciccarone said.

In order to address the issue, experts are trying to figure out how and why fentanyl is making its way into the cocaine supply.

“Lots of experts are being asked this question and making guesses, but they are all guesses,” said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford professor and drug policy expert. “It’s quite possible that this is happening way up stream over the head of dealers, and it’s something higher up in the supply chain that isn’t very well understood.”

Although putting fentanyl in cocaine might seem malicious, experts say that likely isn’t the intent.

“Nobody wants to kill off their customer,” said Tino Fuentes, a harm reduction and overdose reversal specialist. Some people have hypothesized that dealers are trying to get customers hooked on opioids, which are more addictive than cocaine, but Fuentes said this is unlikely.

“Nobody’s trying to put fentanyl in their shit to get their coke customers [to switch] over to heroin when their business is coke,” he said.

Fuentes says that cross-contamination may be to blame.

“They’re not cleaning the scales. They’re not cleaning the grinders. They’re not cleaning the strainers,” he said. “So whatever’s left there is going to be picked up in the first batch of coke.”

View the original article at thefix.com

20 October 2018
Alleged Drug Dealer Indicted For Fentanyl Overdose Death

Calvin Warren Jr. is the first person to be arrested and charged under a new Florida law.

A new Florida law regarding the prosecution of drug dealers, signed by Gov. Rick Scott in 2017, has gone into effect. The law expanded the state’s first-degree murder code to include adults who sell a lethal dose of fentanyl.

The Palm Beach Post reported that Calvin Warren Jr., 35, was arrested on first-degree murder charges in the overdose death of 36-year-old Thomas Matuseski. Warren is the first person to be arrested and charged under the new law.

Thomas Matuseski died on January 28 after ingesting fentanyl; Warren is accused of providing the deadly drug. Warren remains in the Palm Beach County Jail without the possibility of parole. The indictment against him states that he caused Matuseski’s death “unlawfully from a premeditated design.”

The Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office announced that Warren distributed heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. On January 28, Matuseski’s roommate found him collapsed on his bedroom floor in Boynton Beach, according to city police records. Matuseski’s friend called 911 but the Boynton rescue crews were unable to resuscitate him.

Police reported no sign of drugs or paraphernalia in Matuseski’s home on Citrus Park Lane, and it was not announced how Warren was suspected to be linked to Matuseski’s death. Police records do show that Warren was arrested in February on a case that remains open and includes multiple drug-related charges.

Greg Newburn, Florida’s state policy director for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, told The Daily Beast, “Most deaths we’ve seen since the rise of fentanyl in Florida have been a mixture of heroin and fentanyl.”

Florida’s new law does not account for the mixture of drugs or if the dealer claims to have known they were using fentanyl. If a drug mixture containing any amount of fentanyl is involved in the drug user’s death, the dealer can be charged with first-degree murder, a charge for which “the only two sentences available are life without parole and the death penalty,” Newburn said.

“We will aggressively charge drug dealers who spread fentanyl-laced heroin into our community,” Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said in a statement, as reported in The Palm Beach Post. “We will use all tools provided us by the Florida Legislature to hold drug dealers accountable for causing the deaths of others.”

Thomas Matuseski was a New York native, and according to his obituary was remembered as a loving father and son who loved sports.

View the original article at thefix.com

11 October 2018
Maryland Funeral Directors: We're The "Last Responders" To Opioid Crisis

Funeral directors in the state claim that safety has become an issue when dealing with opioid overdose victims.

Proactive funeral directors in Maryland are stocking up on naloxone, the opioid overdose antidote, as they’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of opioid-related deaths.

They’re calling themselves the “last responders” to Maryland’s opioid crisis, the Baltimore Sun reports.

In 2017, the Tri-County Funeral Directors Association launched an awareness campaign in local newspapers to notify communities that “We Don’t Want Your Business” when it comes to opioid abuse.

“We see a side of this tragic epidemic that many don’t see,” said association president James Schwartz. “The devastation families are facing is heartbreaking.”

Schwartz tells the Baltimore Sun that other funeral home directors have known not only family members, but funeral home guests “who have come and had either an opioid reaction in the parking lot or other areas during the service time.”

“This has caused the folks stress because not only are they grieving this person and now somebody else is having the same tragic result,” Schwartz said.

The National Funeral Directors Association urges members to protect themselves while handling deceased victims of opioid overdose.

“Coming into contact with a minuscule dose of fentanyl or carfentanil can be fatal,” the association warns. (This point is oft-repeated, but harm reduction and addiction/recovery advocates say it’s merely a harmful myth.)

“The opioid crisis presents unique challenges for funeral directors, from working with families whose loved one has died from an overdose to protecting themselves from harm when handling the body of an overdose victim during removal or embalming,” says the funeral directors association.

In 2017, opioid overdose deaths continued to climb in Maryland, accounting for the majority of drug/alcohol-related deaths—2,009 of 2,282 overdoses were opioid-related, according to the state’s Department of Health.

“This is an escalating epidemic,” said Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen, whose city saw the worst of the opioid crisis. “But still we don’t even see the peak of this epidemic yet.”

In response, Maryland schools and libraries are also stocking up on naloxone. “The rule of thumb is: when in doubt, use it,” said funeral director Jeffrey L. Gair.

The antidote is there “if there’s ever the need while we’re on duty at the funeral home,” Gair said.

View the original article at thefix.com

10 October 2018
Narcan Creator Working On Fentanyl "Antidote"

The new formulation is reportedly five times stronger than Narcan and will last longer.

A stronger formulation of Narcan (naloxone) nasal spray, the opioid overdose antidote, is in the works, FOX Business reports. There’s a need for a stronger antidote, its developers say, to counter the rising use of fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid pain reliever said to be 50-100 times more potent than morphine. Though it is a pharmaceutical drug, illicitly-made fentanyl is said to have fueled rising rates of drug overdose deaths in the United States.

Narcan nasal spray, which reverses opioid overdose, hit the market in early 2016 after receiving fast-track designation by the Food and Drug Administration. Now first responders, health workers, and laypeople across the U.S. are equipped with Narcan—but in some cases, the otherwise life-saving drug is not enough.

“Narcan is not the 100% fail safe that people may think it is, it does not always work,” warned police officials in West Fargo, North Dakota, responding to the emergence of acryl fentanyl, a newer, stronger fentanyl analog, last year. These illicitly-made opioids may require multiple doses of Narcan.

Roger Crystal, the creator of Narcan and CEO of Opiant Pharmaceuticals, is now working with the government to create a new opioid overdose antidote that will match the strength of increasingly potent fentanyl analogs.

The new formulation, Nasal Nalmefene, will not only be stronger but will last longer. “The reason we think it could have advantages is because nalmefene is a drug itself [and] is stronger than naloxone. It’s five time stronger and it lasts longer,” Crystal told FOX Business.

According to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl accounts for a significant portion of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. In 2016, opioids (prescription and illicit) accounted for 42,249 deaths out of total 63,632 drug overdose deaths in the U.S.

The CDC also reported that “over half of people in 10 states who died of opioid overdoses during the second half of 2016 tested positive for fentanyl.”

Crystal, who is working with the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, said they are aiming for FDA approval of Nasal Nalmefene by 2020.

“Compounds like fentanyl, carfentanil and other synthetic opioids act for longer periods of time. The concern is that naloxone’s half-life doesn’t provide sufficient cover to prevailing amounts of fentanyl in the blood,” said Crystal in a past interview.

Learn how to administer naloxone: How to Reverse an Opioid Overdose with Naloxone.

View the original article at thefix.com

9 October 2018
"Dilbert" Creator Addresses Son’s Apparent Fentanyl Overdose

“If you don’t have any personal experience with opioid addiction, it doesn’t look like anything else you’ve ever seen,” Adams said.

Cartoonist Scott Adams is grieving the loss of his stepson, who died of an apparent fentanyl overdose last weekend. On a live video stream Monday, Adams described the moment he found out about 18-year-old Justin’s death and the path that led his son to his demise.

“Yesterday I got a call… from my ex-wife who told me that my stepson, the little boy that I raised from the age of two, was dead,” said Adams, better known as the creator of the Dilbert comic strip.

“He died last night… in his bed from what appears to be a fentanyl overdose. I got to watch my dead, blue, bloated son taken out on a stretcher in front of his mother and biological father.”

Justin had a fentanyl patch on his arm, Adams said. “Fentanyl probably killed my son yesterday.”

Justin had struggled with his drug use for years. “We weren’t surprised, because he’d had a long battle with addiction since he was 14,” said Adams.

A traumatic injury as a young man had changed him completely. “He had a very bad head injury when he was 14 from a bicycle accident. His behavior changed after the accident,” said Adams. “He sort of lost his ability to make good decisions… He lost his impulse control, he lost his fear.”

His family couldn’t help him, Adams said, especially because was never ready to seek help. “He never wanted to get better. From the time he started doing drugs, he wanted to do more drugs and that’s all he wanted.”

Adams described what it’s like to see a loved one lost in addiction. “If you don’t have any personal experience with opioid addiction, it doesn’t look like anything else you’ve ever seen,” he said in the emotional live stream. “It turns people into walking zombies who quite clearly are not in their own mind and are not in control of their actions.”

Fentanyl is a pharmaceutical painkiller said to be 50-100 times stronger than morphine. Because of its high potency and the growing demand for opioids, an illicit market for fentanyl has emerged. It is said to have fueled the rise in opioid-related deaths over the years.

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded 63,632 drug overdose deaths in the U.S.—42,249 of them involved prescription and illicit opioids, including fentanyl.

Adams, who’s made a name for himself as a conservative pundit of some sort, goes on to “call for [the] execution” of the people who according to the U.S. government are to blame for the fentanyl crisis—Chinese suppliers.

Adams stoically explains that executing “Chinese executives” of companies who produce and distribute illicit fentanyl “would be a great step.”

View the original article at thefix.com

8 October 2018
Are $1 Test Strips The Key To Curbing Fentanyl Deaths?

Harm reduction advocates are applauding a new study that examines whether the test strips proved beneficial to injection drug users.

Fentanyl, the powerful opioid said to be responsible for exacerbating the opioid crisis, could be meeting its match: a $1 test strip that indicates the presence of fentanyl in street drugs.

A group of researchers wondered, if drug users had free access to these test strips, would they adjust their drug use to avoid dying from fentanyl?

They put together a research study, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, that distributed test strips to 125 heroin users at a needle exchange program in Greensboro, North Carolina. They then distributed an online survey that revealed 81% of the heroin users had used the strips, with 63% reporting that their drugs tested positive.

Those who saw that their drugs contained fentanyl were five times more likely to adjust the way they used the drug so they would not overdose.

For example, they may have opted to snort it instead of injecting it, slowing down the rate at which it enters the bloodstream. Others opted to simply use a smaller dose.

The results are in line with a study by Johns Hopkins University researchers that found that users who preferred to inject their drugs did want to know if fentanyl was present, and would take its presence into account when using.

Proponents of harm reduction see the study as a positive step forward.

“Harm reduction at its core is a scrappy self-made movement,” said Daniel Ciccarone, a UCSF professor and study co-author. “Syringe exchange and naloxone peer distribution came out of this movement and have gone mainstream. But the [test strips] need an evidence base in order to become the next intervention in this legacy.”

Slowly but surely, test strips are making their way to being distributed alongside clean needles at needle exchanges. However, unlike clean needles, test strips are still considered paraphernalia and thus face some legal restrictions in their distribution.

The District of Columbia and Maryland have already adjusted their laws to allow the distribution of test strips, and advocates are confident other cities will soon follow.

But even if the legal jam were to be overcome, there’s another problem. That $1 price tag on each strip adds up. Critics say it’s more cost-efficient for users to simply act like all their drugs contain fentanyl instead of testing each and every dose, but that’s not good enough, said Jon Zibbell, RTI International public health analyst and study author.

“That’s like saying, ‘Assume everyone you have sex with has chlamydia,’” Zibbell said, suggesting that most people don’t act on a risk unless they have concrete evidence it’s real.

He hopes that the strips will lead to more cost-effective bulk testing methods, such as spectrometers that scan for fentanyl at every needle exchange site.

View the original article at thefix.com

8 October 2018