Unintended Consequences In Overdose Crisis
When it comes to the opioid addiction crisis in the United States, a series of well intended government interventions have caused new and bigger problems to arise. The national epidemic of opioid abuse began when doctors over-prescribed opioid pain medications. With prescription opioids readily available (many available in affordable generic versions), abuse became rampant. In response to the growing crisis, the federal government tightened regulations on opioid prescriptions making them harder to obtain through legal means. The street value of these drugs rose in response to the restrictions to the point that heroin became a cheaper and equally available alternative. Now a new force is entering the market with potentially disastrous results. Counterfeit (and unregulated) prescription tablets have been flooding into the country, which gives a false sense of safety in the mind of users.
More than two dozen patients were rushed into an emergency room in Macon, Ga., over two days with the same array of life-threatening symptoms, including organ failure and sepsis, flummoxing doctors. But after their breathing tubes were removed, the patients revealed a common thread: All had taken what they believed were Percocet pills they had bought on the street.
Although they looked like the prescription painkillers at first glance, the pills they took were nothing like what they expected. They were fakes, an amalgam of substances — including one never before seen in Georgia — pressed into a pill that mimicked those a doctor would prescribe. Instead of a low dose of Percocet, the users were slammed with a near-lethal combination of other drugs, including U-47700, a synthetic opioid the Drug Enforcement Administration said has been linked to dozens of deaths.
“I’d never seen any medication or drug present with multi-organ failure, mimicking stroke, sepsis, all at the same time,” said Gregory Whatley, an emergency room doctor at Navicent Health in Macon who called Georgia Poison Control after realizing multiple patients took the same small yellow pills. “Not to be cavalier, it was a real killer.”
Law enforcement officials and medical professionals say that counterfeit opioid pills like those found in Macon have been flooding the illicit drug market and have been sickening — and killing — those who are seeking out powerful prescription drugs amid a worsening national opioid crisis. There is widespread fear that users who believe the prescription drugs are safe — because they are quality-controlled products of a regulated industry — could now unwittingly end up ingesting potent cocktails of unknown substances. In many places, the pills contain fentanyl, a synthetic drug that is driving a nationwide surge in overdose deaths.
