An email from King County public health:
Hi, folks. Since March 3, our Medical Examiner’s Office has identified 7 deaths likely related to heroin use. Public Health issued a press release late this afternoon which is included below. Until we learn more, we are advising heroin users to treat all heroin as suspect.
The email doesn’t guess why local heroin has gotten stronger. But if the past is prologue, I’m guessing it has something to do with fentanyl, a popular drug on its own and as a cut in heroin:
Pure fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine, and doses are measured in micrograms instead of milligrams: Unless it’s mixed very precisely and very evenly, the strength of the drug can vary dramatically—dangerously—from one hit to the next. A few years ago, the Midwest and East Coast saw at least 1,000 heroin overdoses after a lab in Toluca, Mexico, produced fentanyl that was then cut into the heroin supply chain, making the heroin much, much stronger—unevenly so…
Mexican authorities busted the Toluca lab near Mexico City in May of 2006. Fentanyl-related overdose deaths in a sampling of US cities peaked a month later at 150 before declining sharply to a single death in February of 2007.
In other news, Canadian hospitals are running out of drugs, from painkillers to antibiotics, and planning to delay surgeries and prioritize who gets what medications based on how close they are to death’s door. The reason for the shortage: Sandoz, the sole supplier to Canadian hospitals of “roughly 90 percent” of their injectable drugs, slowed production to deal with problems identified by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.
Call me crazy, but a nation’s health-care system relying on one pharmaceutical company for 90 percent of its critical drugs seems like a terrible idea.
