Tommy Farmer / Tennessee Bureau of Investigation via AP
This photo provided by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation shows fake Oxycodone pills that are actually composed of fentanyl seized and submitted to bureau crime labs.
Friday, April 16, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Tiny specks of this powerful synthetic opioid can prove fatal even when ingested unknowingly: Fentanyl killed 219 people in the Las Vegas Valley in 2020, about a 200% increase from the previous year.
Recently, while the country was ravaged by the opioid crisis, Clark County saw a drop in annual deaths blamed on all opioids from 2015 to 2018, the year with the lowest figure in at least a decade.
Since then, those numbers have soared.
“We said fentanyl was coming,” Metro Police Capt. John Pelletier told reporters Thursday. “Fentanyl is here.”
Asked how this year was going, he answered succinctly: “not good.”
Fentanyl deaths are on par with the “alarming” 30% increase in total overdose deaths in 2020, when 768 people succumbed to them, compared with 591 in 2019, Pelletier said, noting that fentanyl killed 31 people in August, an average of one a day.
Metro on Thursday announced the creation of the Overdose Response Team, a task force that comprises agencies such as local police departments, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and local and federal prosecutors that “if possible,” authorities would pursue murder cases for dealers accused of killing their clients with drugs. He didn’t expound on how the task force would operate.
A major issue is counterfeit pills made to resemble prescription medications, which criminal enterprises manufacture with fentanyl.
“They look real enough,” Pelletier said about the pills sold on the streets.
The synthetic opioid has been described as up to 100 times more potent than morphine and heroin.
Most fentanyl overdoses occur when the victims don’t know their drugs are mixed with the synthetic opioid; they underestimate its effects or don’t know that counterfeit pills “never contain an exact amount of the narcotic,” the release said.
A DEA official once compared the process of making an irregular batch of counterfeit pills to making chocolate chip cookies, the chips representing fentanyl. When mixing the dough, chocolate chips are rarely distributed evenly — some cookies get a few chips, others get many.
Similarly, a batch of counterfeit pills will have some with low concentrations of fentanyl powder and some pills with a higher concentration that can cause overdoses.
Pelletier didn’t say where the pills were coming from or if the deaths were attributed to certain organizations.
At the end of last year, Mexican authorities reported seizing 1.3 tons of fentanyl in the country, a nearly 500% increase from the previous year.
Luis Cresencio Sandoval, Mexico’s defense secretary, credited the rise to how easily the pills are to manufacture and traffic, and their addictive nature, which makes them more profitable, the Associated Press reported.
Cartels in Mexico typically import the chemicals needed to create the synthetic opioids from Asia, then traffic them to the U.S. as counterfeit pills.
Then they end up in communities such as Clark County, where victims ranged from teenagers to the elderly, Pelletier said. “Every single one of these did not have to happen,” he noted, acknowledging a map poster of Clark County dotted with red to note overdose deaths.
The numbers could be higher.
Another possible 3,249 deaths have been averted by Clark County medical services with Narcan, the brand name of naloxone, which is administered via nasal spray, Metro said in a release.
Naloxone was designed to counteract the effects of opioids by blocking the brain receptors that absorb them.
“This emergency, this situation, does not discriminate,” Pelletier said. “It does not care how old you are; it does not care where you live.”
