Drug-laced ‘stickers’ suspected in fatal OD
They look like what children would put in a scrapbook, but the colourful stickers showing up in Alberta may be delivering deadly doses of fentanyl.
Paramedics in that province are warning their colleagues of a possible new ingestion route for fentanyl after harmless-looking stickers were found in the pockets of a suspected overdose victim in Calgary.
The person’s discoloured saliva matched the colours of the stickers.
The stickers haven’t yet been tested to confirm the presence of fentanyl or any other illicit drug.
However, police in Ontario and Manitoba have seized fentanyl “blotters” — paper tablets similar to LSD “tabs.”
Blotters can be made from raw crystals of fentanyl that are crushed to talc and put into a solution that’s used to soak or dip sheets of paper.
“The crystals can then dry and be bound in paper, which will then become absorbed when they’re applied to a wet surface or shoved under your tongue,” said Tim Lehman, a duty supervisor at B.C. Emergency Health Services and a member of a provincial first responders fentanyl task force.
“Once you soak it into a sheet, it’s uniformly soaked per square millimetre, the whole premise being that then you have a dose in each sheet, you let it dry and then you can cut out a dose.
“Is it exact? No. Who knows what else is in it.”
In medicine, fentanyl usually comes in slow-release prescription transdermal patches. Its abuse by people looking to get high has soared. Of 655 fentanyl-related deaths across Canada between 2009 and 2014, most were the result of valid prescriptions that were abused or diverted to the street.
The “stickers” found in Calgary are not prescription-grade fentanyl patches. Rather, they look like something a “three-year-old would put into a colouring book,” said Dr. Mark Yarema, an emergency physician and medical director of Alberta Health Service’s poison and drug information service.
Yarema said he is aware of at least two possible overdose cases in Calgary involving the stickers. If you use the drugs, “you’re playing Russian roulette and you really have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said.
Fentanyl’s strength is 100 times that of morphine.
“Paramedics are the first to recognize, ‘Hey, we have a new ingestion route,’ or ‘We have a new drug,’” said Marc Moebis, executive director of the Alberta Paramedic Association, which shared the Calgary paramedic’s warning about fentanyl stickers in a Facebook post. “Some of the things that we find for drug ingestion sound very unlikely and yet they’re very real. Across the country, addicts are overdosing and dying at unprecedented rates. In Vancouver, more people have fatally overdosed so far this year than in all of 2016 with 232 deaths recorded since the start of the year compared with 231 fatalities for last year, many involving fentanyl. In Ontario, fentanyl-related deaths in all age groups in the province increased 548 per cent between 2006 and 2015.
Like other opioid drugs, fentanyl latches onto the receptors in the brain that control breathing. Breathing can slow down or come to a stop, leading to cardiac arrest.
Vancouver Police Department and B.C. Emergency Health Services said they have not seen fentanyl-laced “stickers” or blotters in the province.
— With files from Postmedia News