Tainted New Haven Heroin Could Be Anywhere in State: PD

New Haven, CT — A tainted supply of heroin and/or cocaine in New Haven caused at least 16 overdoses, three of them fatal Thursday.
Many victims told detectives that they thought they were buying cocaine, said Officer David Hartman, police spokesman. He warned users across the state that it isn’t known how far the product has been sold.

• Get real time updates on this story and other Patch stories with email news alerts here.

“Any such drug should be considered deadly,” he said. “There is also no reason to suspect there are any boundaries to how far the tainted drugs have been sold or distributed. Neighboring communities are warned as well.”
The suspected deadly cocktail was heroin, the powerful opioid fentanyl and something else that “caused havoc to patients’ lungs,” said Dr. Gail D’Onofrio, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.
Many victims that survived are on artifical respiration due to very low oxygen levels, D’Onofrio said.
Tests are being done to determine what substances are involved.
Gov. Dannel Malloy pledged to offer New Haven whatever support it needed. He ordered 700 doses of the opioid overdose reversing drug Narcan, the brand name of Naloxone be released to city first responders from the state Department of Public Health.
"This is a very dangerous situation and one that we are taking seriously,” Malloy said. “Everyone must recognize that no region of the country, state, city or town is immune - this affects all of us and so many families across our state and nation.”
Other Connecticut Stories on the Heroin Epidemic:

• Overdose Deaths Overwhelm Connecticut Medical Examiner's Office
• CT Heroin Epidemic: Interactive Map of Deaths by Town
• Opioid Overdose Deaths on The Rise Once Again in Connecticut
• CT Heroin Dealers Put on Notice: Overdose Deaths Turn to Arrests
• North Haven Crews Revive Man, 19, After Heroin Overdose

Timeline of Carnage
The Fire Department started responding to calls for overdoses at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, said Assistant Fire Chief Matthew Marcarelli. There were a few cases were individuals went into respiratory arrest and were able to be revived using Narcan, the brand name of Naloxone.
Around 3:30 p.m. multiple 911 calls came in about multiple overdoses. It started at two in Newhallville and quickly increased to five victims in that community, Marcarelli said.
Police Chief Dean Esserman said he responded to a call for two people who were overdosing in a car off of Bowen Field. About 100 yards away three other people were overdosing in the same parking lot, he said. He called the work of first responders extraordinary.
Some patients had to be given as many as five doses of Narcan to revive them, Marcarelli said. All victims were sent to the hospital and two were in cardiac arrest.
"Most of the cases originated in the city’s Newhallville/ Dixwell community," Hartman said. “Others victims were discovered downtown and in the Annex. West Haven and Shelton have also reported a case or cases."
“Whatever the product was that we were dealing with it was stronger than typically encountered,” he said.
So much Narcan was used that firefighters ran very low on their supply and had to get more from public safety partners in Hartford, Yale-New Haven Hospital and American Medical Response. Gov. Dannel Malloy ordered that the state Department of Public Health release 700 doses of Narcan to New Haven first responders.
Naloxone can reverse respiratory arrest caused by a opioid overdose, but not cardiac arrest.
Overdose reports began to slow down around 10 p.m. after the city declared a public health emergency and sent out a call to residents using the Everbridge call system.
Two of the fatalities were in New Haven and a third was in another Connecticut community, Hartman said. The total amount of overdoses could be close to or above 20 when other towns are factored in, he said.

Not a Unique Problem
While such a large number of overdoses at once is likely unprecedented in Connecticut, it speaks to the epidemic of opioid addiction in Connecticut and nationwide. Opioids were involved in 28,647 deaths nationally in 2014, and overdoses have quadrupled since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Connecticut had 568 drug overdoses in 2014, 729 in 2015 and is on track to have more than 800 by the end of 2016, according to the Office of the State Medical Examiner. The vast majority of deaths involved opioids.
Officials suspect the New Haven heroin was laced with the powerful opioid fentanyl.
The synthetic drug is 80 times stronger than morphine, and it has been involved in an increasing number of overdoses over the past two years in Connecticut. More than 300 people are projected to die from fentanyl-related overdoses in the state this year. It's a sharp increase from the 18 cases in 2012.
The drug can be prescribed legally for extreme pain, but it is often used illicitly to cut heroin and increase its potency.
Prince died of an accidental overdose from fentanyl. It's unclear how he got the drug, according to CNN.

D'Onofrio said that drug traffickers can make a lot of money by using fentanyl to boost heroin's effectiveness. It's a white powder that is indistinguishable visually from other substances.

"Some users want to use it cause they can use a small amount and get very high,” she said.

Many of the New Haven overdose victims were especially susceptible to overdoses because they lacked any opiate tolerance, she said.

A Drug Enforcement Agency task force recently made nine arrests and seized 2.5 kilograms of suspected fentanyl along with large quantities of other drugs in Connecticut. Fentanyl was purchased from China over the darknet, an online network only accessible with certain software, according to the U.S. Attorney District of Connecticut office.

Multiple law enforcement agencies at all levels of government in Connecticut are working together to go after illicit opioid dealers whose product leads to overdose deaths.
Image via Dimitris Kalogeropoylos/Flickr Commons