This Is Georgia's Most-Used Hard Drug

DECATUR, GA — Methamphetamine has, far and away, been the most commonly used drug in Georgia aside from marijuana this year, according to testing by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Out of 3,954 drug cases submitted to the GBI's drug lab in Decatur in 2018, 1,890 of them turned out to be meth. Rounding out the top five most common drugs tested in the lab are cocaine (891 cases), alprazolam (201), oxycodone (196) and heroin (175).

Those numbers, released by the GBI on Monday, were as of May 22. The agency noted that it does not test every item submitted to it by law enforcement and does not routinely test marijuana.

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The top five so far in 2018 comes in the same order as year-end figures for 2017, the GBI said, and the sixth most-common drug, hydrocodone, also was No. 6 in 2017.

The data was released just hours after the GBI announced that five people were arrested last week in Newnan in a drug raid that netted well over a pound of meth, more than $6,000 in cash, 17 assorted pills and marijuana.

Among the opioids tested by the GBI, the most common were oxycodone, heroin, hydrocodone and fentanyl and fentanyl analogs. Eleven different variations of fentnyl — a legal, but dangerously strong, opioid used by doctors in extreme pain cases — have been tested at the crime lab so far this year.

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Last year, the GBI warned that a wave of overdose deaths was related, in part, to furanyl fentanyl, a chemical offshoot of the drug that is illegal and capable of causing death in very small doses, according to the agency.

The GBI said that the five counties with the highest use of opioids in the state so far this year have been Cobb, Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb and Chatham, in that order. Chatham (the Savannah area) replaces Richmond (around Augusta), which was No. 5 through all of last year. The rest of the top five is the same.

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