‘Crazy Dangerous’ Elephant Tranquilizer, Heroin Cocktail Sweeps Nation

On its face, this doesn’t seem to be a good idea: Ever more resourceful drug dealers are mixing heroin, a very bad drug to begin with, with a tranquilizer designed to sedate elephants and other large animals. And it isn’t, according to law enforcement and public health officials across the country, including Wayne County, Michigan, where the potent drug cocktail has been linked to 19 deaths since July.

Experts with the National Institutes of Health say the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil is 10,000 times more powerful than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, another drug authorities say has claimed multiple lives in Metro Detroit. As little as 2 milligrams can knock down a 1-ton African elephant.

Carfentanil causes the sudden onset, often within minutes of use, of disorientation, coughing, sedation, respiratory distress or cardiac arrest and death, public health officials say. Even a small dose can kill within minutes.

“Opioid and heroin use have deadly effects, and the introduction of carfentanil into the drug supply makes the potential for fatality due to overdose even greater,” Dr. Eden Wells, chief medical executive of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, said in a news release.

Besides the current cases in Wayne County, carfentanil is also suspected in a pair of Kent County overdoses, the Health Department said.

The drug first showed up in Ohio, where it was linked to at least eight overdose deaths in the Cincinnati area. Police officials told WWJ Radio in Detroit that carfentanil use could result in “tens-to-hundreds of overdoses in a short amount of time within the same geographic region” and that the opioid overdose antidote naloxone may not be as effective with carfentanil.

Ohio has been among the states hit hardest by the use of carfentanil. It is often sold in pill form, but police in Akron, Ohio, said carfentanil showed up in syringes used by more than 90 people who overdosed in July, WOOD-TV reported.

Public health officials in Michigan said they saw an increase last week in severe opioid-related toxicity in southeast and central Michigan reported to the Michigan Regional Poison Control Center at Children’s Hospital of Michigan that "fit the clinical picture expected with carfentanil.”

Clinton Township 41-B District Judge Linda B. Davis, president of Families Against Narcotics and chairwoman of Gov. Rick Snyder’s commission on opiate prevention, told the Detroit Free Press carfentanil “makes it more deadly than heroin already is ... This is really deadly. It is devastating communities.”

And scarier than the potency of synthetic drugs like carfentanil and fentanyl is that some users may not even know they’re getting the deadly cocktail, since drug peddlers often cut heroin with the narcotics to stretch their supplies, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“The street drug supply is probably more dangerous than usual because of carfentanil,” Dr. Carl Schmidt, Wayne County chief medical examiner, told the Free Press. “There are other derivatives of opiates that may be present as well, and may be more potent than fentanyl already is. As always, purchasing street drugs comes with a risk — you may get something other than what you think you bought.”

Even casual contact with carfentanil can be dangerous. DEA Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg called it “crazy dangerous” in a Sept. 22 public health warning to the public and law enforcement who come in contact with it.

“Carfentanil is surfacing in more and more communities,” Rosenberg said in a news release. “We see it on the streets, often disguised as heroin. It is crazy dangerous. Synthetics such as fentanyl and carfentanil can kill you. I hope our first responders — and the public — will read and heed our health and safety warning. These men and women have remarkably difficult jobs and we need them to be well and healthy.”

Photo by Lauri Rantala via Flickr Commons