Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The deaths of at least 20 people in New Mexico who overdosed on the powerful painkiller fentanyl, disguised as oxycodone, underscores New Mexico’s opioid drug problem.
The Ruidoso victims illegally purchased what appeared to be 30-milligram pills of oxycodone, a prescription painkiller, but federal agents believe it was fentanyl mixed with a neutral powder.
Fentanyl is up to 100 times stronger than morphine. It can be lethal even in small doses.
Drug Enforcement Agency agents say the pills were likely manufactured in Mexico using fentanyl powder from China that can cost a few thousand bucks for a kilogram and be turned into counterfeit oxycodone pills that can net traffickers millions of dollars.
Oxycodone pills typically cost $1 per milligram, or $30 for one 30-milligram pill, while the fentanyl pills have been sold for as little as $5 a pill.
Toxicology tests in the 20 New Mexico deaths showed fentanyl and slightly different chemical versions of it called analogs, which can be stronger than legally produced fentanyl and may take more naloxone (Narcan) to counter than it would to counter a heroin overdose.
Fake oxycodone pills are showing up around the country, and there were more than 700 fentanyl-related deaths in late 2013 and 2014.
If that scares you, and it should, consider the growing use of carfentanil, a synthetic anesthetic designed to tranquilize elephants and other large animals. It is not approved for use in humans, but drug traffickers are mixing it with heroin and it has become popular in some states among addicts looking for ever stronger highs. It has caused hundreds of overdoses and several deaths in states like Ohio, which has been particularly hard hit.
Carfentanil is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times stronger than fentanyl, as reported by columnist Diane Dimond in a recent Albuquerque Journal.
So we have Chinese chemists and Mexican drug pushers to thank for introducing even more powerful ways to make obscene profits at American addicts’ expense. But part of the solution must lie with slowing the demand on the U.S. side of the border for high-risk drugs that damage and destroy lives and families.
Which is why the HOPE (Heroin and Opioid Prevent and Education) Initiative of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico and the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center is important. In addition to prosecution, its focus is on diversion, rehabilitation and re-entry programs and it is working with community organizations.
The fact that people are so addicted that they are willing to turn to knock-off drugs or buy pills they think — hope — are the real thing says a lot about how serious the drug epidemic has become. This is a new kind of drug war.
— Albuquerque Journal