The US Drug Enforcement Agency has issued warnings about a worrying trend in which people are overdosing after inadvertently taking the highly potent synthetic opioid fentanyl.
According to The Hill, in a letter to federal law enforcement this week, the DEA said there has been a nationwide rise in so-called mass “overdose parties” related to fentanyl that involve three or more overdoses occurring at the same time. time and place.
According to the agency, there were at least seven confirmed mass overdose parties in the United States in just two months, resulting in 29 overdose deaths.
The agency noted that illegal drug smugglers often mix fentanyl – which can be 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine – with other powdered drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine because it is cheap to manufacture and a small amount can be incredibly powerful.
The DEA said this trend has led to mass overdoses in which users unknowingly take large doses of the drug.
Three of seven mass overdose events occurred in March alone. In one case, 21 people at a homeless shelter in Austin, Texas overdosed after taking cocaine and methamphetamine supplemented with fentanyl and three of those died.
In Cortez, Colorado, three people died in a hotel room after taking what they thought were oxycodone pills but they were fake pills containing fentanyl.
“Fentanyl is killing Americans at an unprecedented rate,” DEA Director Milgram said in a statement.
Fentanyl fueled an unprecedented rise in overdoses of the deadly drug nationwide. More than 105,000 Americans died from overdoses in the 12 months to October, with more than 66 percent of those deaths involving fentanyl or other dangerous synthetic opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).