AUGUSTA, Maine - Maine Attorney General Janet Mills announced today that the number of opiate overdose fatalities in the state is keeping pace with the high rate set last year. And she says deaths from heroin and a powerful synthetic opiate called fentanyl are climbing.Last week, Portland resident Angelo Alonzo shot up what he believed was a safe dose of heroin, and he nearly died. He blames an illegal version of a powerful painkiller, fentanyl.
"It was fentanyl, fentanyl-laced, because it was enough to drop me to my knees," he says. "An amount that usually gives me a good mellow high as just way too much and I woke up in the shower and I was cold. And I didn’t put myself there."
Alonzo was lucky: a friend injected him with an emergency anti-overdose drug called Naloxone, and Alonzo checked himself in to the Milestone Foundation’s rehab center in Portland.
While it would take a toxicology workup to discover exactly what was in the dose that floored him, Alonzo does know that fentanyl, which can be 50 times as potent as heroin, is making a big showing in Maine.
"By the time dope makes its way to Maine, it’s so cut down ‘cause it's been stepped on or cut into by so many hands that the purity isn’t there," he says. "So you want customers to come at you, so an easy cheap way to do it is, if the fentanyl is 20 to 40 times stronger than heroin, if you make that right mix, everyone loves your stuff. But you know that right mix might kill some people too."
In a medical setting, pharmaceutical fentanyl is considered a blessing for patients in extreme pain. But authorities say, in the last two years, Mexican cartels have ramped up production of a new version of the drug, "acetyl" fentanyl, and they are smuggling the powder into the U.S.
Mary Lou Leary is Deputy Secretary of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "Heroin is bad enough but when you lace it with fentanyl, it’s like dropping a nuclear bomb on the situation," she says. "It’s so, so much more dangerous."
Two years ago, Maine authorities documented seven deaths primarily cause by fentanyl or acetyl fentanyl. Last year that number jumped 500 percent, to 43 deaths. There were 57 deaths due mainly to heroin last year.
The pace appears to be quickening this year. Just mid-way through the year, in June, 37 overdose deaths were primarily attributable to heroin, and 26 primarily to fentanyl.
And Maine Attorney General Janet Mills says the problem could be getting even worse in the year’s second half. "In July alone, we suspect that approximately one death a day in Maine was due to a drug overdose of some sort. We are confirming this with laboratory testing, but a substantial number of those involved fentanyl."
Law enforcement and policy-makers are struggling to react to the fast-moving epidemic. Only a handful of states - Maine is one of them - have added acetyl fentanyl to their lists of banned substances.
And, with some bumps along the way, Attorney General Mills has been working with lawmakers to stiffen penalties for possession and trafficking of fentanyl and its variants. Mills says the trafficking felony carries a prospect of serious jail time that should ease deal-making for intelligence about drug networks.
And more importantly, she says, it will put pressure on addicts to seek help, "the ability to leverage treatment, for instance, and sometimes information, from people about where the stuff came from. If they are only facing a misdemeanor charge they might only do a few days in jail, the local county jail, and then they are back on the streets again and free to make the same mistakes in life.
In some states, publicity about fentanyl has led users to seek the substance out. Angelo Alonzo says for them, the danger is magnetic.
"The sad thing too, usually when someone hears that people are dropping or dying out there that’s usually when an addict wants that specific stuff. They think that the high is unbelievable and they want it and you can understand why. But that’s a tough call. You’re playing with your life."
It’s unclear what Alonzo’s next call may be in the difficult road toward recovery. He’s checked out of the rehab shelter, against medical advice.