BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Alabama drug dealers are lacing heroin — already one of the most powerful and addictive opioids — with a drug designed to subdue 13,000-pound African bush elephants, and the resulting synthetic mix is leaving a trail of dead bodies in its wake.
The drug is called Carfentanil and health officials estimate that it is 150 times more potent than the heroin that has been sweeping the nation in recent years. It is so powerful, in fact, that when it reached Cincinnati last week, there were 174 heroin overdoses in just 6 days.
The Jefferson County coroner says Carfentanil has already been found in the blood stream of two individuals who died of a heroin overdose locally, and they expect more.
“It’s very alarming,” Dr. Mark Wilson with the Jefferson County Health Department told WBRC. “Heroin was bad enough. Fenatanyl was even worse. This is 100 times worse than Fentanyl. So we want the public to know this is out there. People that are injecting things in their veins could potentially get this and get killed very quickly.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has expressed his belief that America’s porous borders are contributing to an exploding heroin epidemic all across the country.
A revealing report by the Washington Post late last year detailed the rise of U.S. heroin use and the Mexican drug lords that keep the drug in ready supply.
A sophisticated farm-to-arm supply chain is fueling America’s surging heroin appetite, causing heroin to surpass cocaine and meth to become the nation’s No. 1 drug threat for the first time. As demand has grown, the flow of heroin — a once-taboo drug now easier to score in some cities than crack or pot — has changed, too.
Mexican cartels have overtaken the U.S. heroin trade, imposing an almost corporate discipline. They grow and process the drug themselves, increasingly replacing their traditional black tar with an innovative high-quality powder with mass market appeal: It can be smoked or snorted by newcomers as well as shot up by hard-core addicts.
They have broadened distribution beyond the old big-city heroin centers like Chicago or New York to target unlikely places such as Dayton. The midsize Midwestern city today is considered to be an epicenter of the heroin problem, with addicts buying and overdosing in unsettling droves. Crack dealers on street corners have been supplanted by heroin dealers ranging across a far wider landscape, almost invisible to law enforcement. They arrange deals by cellphone and deliver heroin like pizza.
“The lack of enforcement at the border is a big part of this,” Sessions said during a U.S. Senate Committee hearing titled on the heroin epidemic. “We can impact supply. Heroin at low prices and high purity on the streets [is] dangerous, and prosecutions are critical to this. People need to go to jail for pushing this kind of addictive power into our communities and destroying lives and families.”
(h/t CNN)
