Montgomery County Coroner Kent Harshbarger said people might be surprised that heroin is “out,” but that’s because more deadly synthetic opioids now account for more than half of all drug overdose deaths in the county.
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“It’s rare in Montgomery County to see a death from heroin,” Harshbarger said. “Most of the cases we’re seeing now are from fentanyl or the fentanyl analogues.”
Those synthetic analogues – carfentanil, furanylfentanyl, acrylfentanyl – are much more dangerous than heroin. Carfentanil, for example, is 10,000 times more potent than morphine.
“These products are so strong, just that next dose might be your last,” Harshbarger said.
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This week, the Smuggling Task Force arrested four men linked to a Mexican drug cartel, seizing 44 pounds of fentanyl in that one investigation.
“We’re kind of a test bed here in Montgomery County where they keep throwing new substances at us to see if it’s powerful enough to get these people hooked on it and it’s killing us left and right,” said Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer.
Through March — only one quarter of the year — Montgomery County was already halfway to 2016’s totals for drug overdoses, and overdose deaths.
At our current pace, the county would see more than 5,000 overdoses in 2017, compared with 2,505 last year. We’re on pace for 728 deaths after seeing 349 last year.
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Harshbarger and Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer both said they hope the task force’s huge fentanyl bust will cause a dip in overdose deaths, but Brem took a more grim approach.
“It really is a drop in the bucket,” he said. “The stuff that’s coming over our border … we don’t catch a tenth of it.”
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