Cobb Leads State In Opioid Cases: GBI

MARIETTA, GA — Cobb County has had more opioid cases investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation than any other county in the state this year, the agency announced Monday.

There have been 79 Cobb County opioid cases submitted to the GBI's drug lab in Decatur so far in 2018. That's compared to 68 in Gwinnett, 67 in Fulton, 27 in DeKalb and 19 in Chatham, around Savannah. The top four in the 2018 data are the same top four, in the same order, from the GBI's 2017 statistics.

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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In statewide numbers, three of the six most commonly detected drugs by the GBI crime lab this year are opioids — oxycodone (No. 4), heroin (No. 5) and hydrocodone (No. 6).

Methamphetamine has, far and away, been the most commonly used drug in Georgia aside from marijuana this year, according to the testing. Out of 3,954 drug cases submitted to the GBI lab in 2018, 1,890 of them turned out to be meth.

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.

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.

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