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Updated 14 hours ago
PHILADELPHIA – The first time Nicki Saccomanno used fentanyl, she overdosed.
That was in 2016, and the 38-year-old Kensington woman did not know that the drugs she had purchased had been cut with the deadly synthetic opioid. She just remembers being sacked and then waking up surrounded by paramedics frantically trying to revive her.
Saccomanno, addicted to heroin for 10 years, was shaken. But, soon, there was almost nothing else to take than fentanyl to counteract the intense pain of withdrawal. It seemed that every corner was selling it. Saccomanno and other long-time heroin users have been forced to adapt.
Fentanyl is all they have known for young users, like 20-year-olds living in camps off Lehigh Avenue. Like others before them, many of them have become illicit opioids in recent years. Unless they returned to the street for food, they bought a much more potent drug than their older counterparts.
Young and old pay for it with their lives. Fentanyl was present in 84% of the 1,217 fatal overdoses in Philadelphia last year and in 67% of the 5,456 overdose deaths recorded by the state in 2017, according to a recent large-scale report. by the US Drug Enforcement on the state of the opioid crisis in Pennsylvania. Administration.
The report shows how, over the last five years, the opioid crisis has turned into an overdose crisis – how fentanyl has contaminated the state's heroin supply, overwhelmed the morgues of County of overdose victims and shocked defenders, drug addicts and forces its sudden ubiquity.
But for each of them, the explosion of fentanyl has a terrible meaning: fentanyl is significantly cheaper to produce than heroin. It generates a much higher profit. It is far more powerful and addictive than the heroine, even that of Kensington, long known as the cheapest and purest of the country.
Saccomanno currently uses a combination of heroin and fentanyl, although she hates him.
"You're getting sicker," she says. "You need to eat more fentanyl more often. It makes you feel better and stay stronger. But you can not find anything else.
"A radical change"
Pure economy.
This is what law enforcement officials say is behind the rise of fentanyl in Pennsylvania.
It has a legitimate use as a drug to treat severe pain, such as in cancer patients, and has been on the illicit drug market for at least 15 years, said Pat Trainor, spokesperson for the DEA branch, in Philadelphia. But it was mainly manifested by unusual rashes due to overdose and disappeared from the scene.
"Two or three years ago, we really saw a dramatic change," said Trainor. "In the beginning, it was considered a cut or adultery in poor quality heroin, and it has really changed since it's largely, but not completely – replaced most of from the heroin supply in Philadelphia. "
In Philadelphia, he said, a kilo of heroin, or 2.2 pounds, was selling for between $ 50,000 and $ 80,000, and a drug dealer could make a profit of about 500 000 dollars. One kilogram of fentanyl sells for between $ 53,000 and $ 55,000, 50 to 100 times as much, and can generate a profit of up to $ 5 million.
"For many drug trafficking organizations, it's that simple," said Trainor.
According to the DEA report, most of the fentanyl found in Pennsylvania is made in China and smuggled into the United States through Mexican drug trafficking organizations.
People have also tried to get closer to home. Unlike heroin, which comes from poppies with opium, fentanyl and its analogues can be produced in the laboratory. Earlier this year, DEA officers raided a methamphetamine lab in a hotel room in western Pennsylvania. To their surprise, it turned out that the occupant of the room had been trying to make fentanyl.
In search of fentanyl
Earlier this year, researchers from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, as part of a survey of opioid users at the Kensington Needle Exchange Program, asked a question of 400 drug addicts in action .
They knew that most of the city's heroin stores had already been contaminated with fentanyl and wanted to know how addicts were responding. So they asked drug users what they would do if they knew that fentanyl was one of the drugs they were buying.
The answers they received shocked them. Of the drug users surveyed by the Department of Health, 45% told researchers they were not trying to avoid fentanyl at all – they would be more likely to use a bag of fentanyl.
"There was more acceptance. It had become part of the community, which was not the case initially. It was really something people were looking for because it was an improved summit, "said Kendra Viner, head of the department's opioid surveillance program. "And people aged 25 to 34 were much more likely to say that they would be looking for fentanyl."
A woman who identified herself as "shy", a long-time heroin user on Kensington Avenue, said she was trying to test her heroin for fentanyl, but she often resigned herself to the fact that she could not find nothing else to avoid weaning.
In interviews on Kensington Avenue in recent weeks, drug users said they had little choice: although fentanyl high may have felt stronger and better than heroin, it was also difficult to go back to the heroine. Even though fentanyl was more dangerous, they said, their opioid tolerance has become so high that heroin is not enough to prevent weaning.
"Previously, people were scared of fentanyl, they would not do it – but now my body is hanging on," said Kia, a 23-year-old girl interviewed near the Emerald Street camp last week. "If I wake up without drinking heroin cut with fentanyl, I'm still sick."
Physicians and addiction researchers have been advocating for some time to conduct more research on how conventional drug therapies used to treat heroin addiction are effective for people who are now accustomed to a more potent drug. as heroin. Viner said more research on fentanyl tendencies in general was needed – for example, his investigation focused only on Kensington addicts who use needle exchange in the neighborhood. It's harder to follow the habits and preferences of hundreds of people in the city and suburbs who go unnoticed and come to the neighborhood to score points.
Nevertheless, the DEA wrote in its report that the Philadelphia findings – confirmed by treatment providers and drug addicts in the state – are extremely alarming. This is a sign that the supply of contaminated drugs stimulates demand – not the other way around.
William, a Bensalem man who came to Kensington earlier this week for fentanyl, as he has been doing for four months, said he felt trapped by a drug that he had not not necessarily sought after – a drug he now needs to function, that is, to kill his friends and loved ones.
"Abandon – Imagine the worst flu you've ever had," he said – and then increase that pain by 10. "And you know the only thing you hate – the thing that makes you feel this – is the only thing that makes you feel better. "
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Online:
https://bit.ly/2EI0cSb
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Information from: The Philadelphia Inquirer, http://www.inquirer.com
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