KILLED BY THE ‘DROP DEAD’ DRUG
Even one tiny speck can kill and it’s blamed for 10,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. Now we reveal this lethal high is shattering families in Britain, too
To anyone outside her family and close circle of friends, 20-year- old Jemma Longthorp seemed to have it all. Bright, sporty, popular and eyecatchingly pretty, she was studying for a university place and hoped to follow her father into the care profession.
But one morning in March this year, when Stephen Longthorp went to his daughter’s bedroom at their oxford home to see how she was getting on with a college project, he was confronted by a harrowing scene. ‘Jemma would always sit on the floor to work, surrounded by her laptop, iPad and iPhone, and that’s where I found her,’ he told me this week. ‘She had just slumped forward and was cold to the touch. She looked as though she had fallen asleep and never woken up.’ Mr Longthorp knew immediately that Jemma had died from a drug overdose. For, despite outward appearances, she had been struggling with mental illness and, unhappy with the treatment offered by the local health authority, had started self-medicating, using drugs bought on the internet. They would arrive in envelopes from abroad.
But it was at the inquest that her father discovered she had fallen victim to a terrifyingly powerful black-market drug that is threatening to sweep through the country with devastating effect.
Some versions are so potent that just one or two grains the size of sugar granules, if inhaled or brought into contact with the skin, are sufficient to kill, causing people to fall unconscious and stop breathing.
It is called fentanyl, a synthetic opioid which, when it was first manufactured in 1960 by a Belgian physician, Dr Paul Janssen, was hailed as a medical breakthrough — a formula 100 times stronger than morphine, used as an anaesthetic or a hugely powerful painkiller.
It was easily administered via stickon patches, soluble tablets or even flavoured lollipops, and those it benefited included terminally ill cancer patients and women in the final stages of labour.
Today, however, this miracle drug has become a lethal scourge in america — and, as we learnt this week, there are a growing number of victims in the UK.
Figures from the national Crime agency (nCa) reveal the damage fentanyl is already wreaking.
In the past eight months, it has killed 60 people — but with toxicology tests pending on 70 more suspected victims, that total could double. In the past five years, the number of deaths linked to fentanyl abuse has more than trebled.
Moreover, the nCa warned that fentanyl poisoning might be the cause of many more unrecorded fatalities, because coroners here are not yet checking for it.
We would do well to heed the U.S. experience. In the States, fentanyl first surfaced on the black market four years ago and is now responsible for almost 10,000 deaths a year — 30 per cent of all the nation’s opioid-related deaths.
SUCH
are the risks of taking this ultra-addictive euphoria- inducing drug, which costs about £8 a ‘hit’ on the streets, that some dealers and users call it ‘ Drop Dead’. others prefer ‘Serial Killer’.
Fentanyl use crosses the boundaries of income, class and race. Last year, the singer Prince died from fentanyl poisoning, and the drug is thought to have contributed towards the death of actor Philip Seymour hoffman two years earlier.
Fentanyl was also among the cocktail of drugs that killed Michael Jackson and, last year, the singer Chaka Khan went to rehab after admitting she was hooked on it.
equally, however, it is ravaging ordinary communities — cities such as Sacramento, in California, where 12 people were killed by a single batch last year, and the small West Virginia city of huntington, which has been dubbed the epicentre of a national fentanyl epidemic after scores of deaths and overdoses. In just one four- hour period last summer, there were 27 overdoses.
one shocking case to make U.S. headlines was that of a ten-year-old Miami boy who died from fentanyl poisoning in June, after exposure to the drug on a visit to his local swimming baths.
another was that of an ohio police officer who might have died after simply touching granules during a raid, if he hadn’t received a dose of the fentanyl antidote naloxone.
Small wonder Chuck Rosenberg, acting head of the U. S. Drug enforcement administration (Dea), calls fentanyl ‘crazy dangerous’.
now fentanyl has found its way here, though its name still probably means nothing to most parents.
among those fortunate to have survived its effects is the entertainer ant McPartlin, who was reported to have become addicted to fentanyl along with other drugs he used to combat the pain of botched knee surgery. he entered a recovery programme two months ago.
But for many without his resources, there will be no second chance.
HOME
Secretary amber Rudd has vowed to tackle this ‘ terrible blight’ before Britain goes the way of america. It is not before time.
In Britain, fentanyl first became prevalent in the north-east in late 2016, when it was used as a cutting agent in batches of heroin. There have since been clusters of deaths in abuse ‘ hotspots’ in yorkshire, humberside and elsewhere.
over the easter weekend, six deaths in Leeds and Barnsley were linked to heroin laced with fentanyl.
There were six similar deaths in three weeks in Stockton- on-Tees, and seven in eight weeks in hull.
anti- drug charities warn that fentanyl could trigger an epidemic of deaths among the ‘ Trainspotting generation’ of addicts who started using heroin in the eighties and nineties and remain addicted.
Later this year, three men will appear in court following a raid by West yorkshire Police on an alleged fentanyl ‘ laboratory’ in a Leeds warehouse. and last Monday, a 25-year- old man from Gwent was charged in connection with the supply of synthetic opioids (the drug category to which fentanyl belongs).
Meanwhile, the list of ‘Serial Killer’ victims grows ever longer — among them Captain Ben Jukes, a 32-yearold soldier from Manchester, who had secretly been using drugs to cope with stress, and alex Keogh, 28, a teaching assistant from Solihull, found dead in bed by his mother last Christmas eve.
The mother of 19-year-old Rihards Linde, from Grantham, Lincolnshire, told me he was about to begin a business degree course and was not a habitual drug-taker. She felt sure he had no idea what he was dabbling with when he took a fatal dose of fentanyl on a night out with friends last December. She found her son dead the next morning.
Just why fentanyl has surged in popularity is perplexing experts, not least because so many other illegal drugs are easily obtainable, from cocaine and heroin to relative newcomers such as ketamine and MDMa. So, what has prompted this alarming new trend?
For more than four decades since its first use in hospitals, fentanyl aroused little interest with criminals.
American experts have traced its explosive impact on the U.S. black market back to the mid-Nineties, when unscrupulous doctors enriched themselves by prescribing opioid painkillers with such reckless abandon that about two million people became addicted.
When the authorities finally cracked down on this racket, many prescription drug addicts turned to heroin, which Mexican cartels began smuggling over the border in unprecedented quantities. However, heroin, which is derived from poppies, is costly to produce. Its bulk also makes it difficult to transport undetected.
As the cartel bosses discovered, a synthetic opioid, such as fentanyl, is a far more attractive business proposition — not only were the ingredients readily available from Chinese suppliers and easy to assemble with rudimentary knowledge, but there were no restrictions on the supply of the drug in China. Because it was so powerful, quite small, but hugely profitable, quantities could be sent through the mail or via courier, often disguised as packets of silica gel or hidden among urine testing strips.
According to the DEA, one kilogram of heroin can bring the drug cartels $ 50,000 ( around £38,240) in profits.
The same amount of fentanyl is worth $1 million (£765,000).
So Mexican gangs and Chinese suppliers went into partnership and found a ready market.
The Chinese have also developed 30 types of fentanyl derivative, including carfentanil, a tranquilliser designed for use on elephants, which is 100 times stronger than fentanyl (so 10,000 times stronger than morphine) and commensurately dangerous to humans.
To the gangs peddling these drugs on the streets — and on websites on the ‘dark’ internet — all this is of no consequence. Some of them lace heroin and cocaine with fentanyl to increase their potency. Others sell fentanyl alone in the form of tablets pressed in illicit factories or ‘pill mills’, which are springing up across the United States.
When Britain’s NCA joined U.S. authorities in forcing two of the main dark web markets, AlphaBay and Hansa, offline recently, it would have been a setback for the peddlers. But maybe not for long.
This week, New York announced its biggest fentanyl bust to date when police caught a dealer with almost 40 lb of the drug wrapped in cylindrical packages.
In San Francisco, a couple were discovered manufacturing huge quantities of fentanyl pills in their apartment. They sold them on the internet (in return for the digital currency Bitcoin) and sent them — possibly to Britain — in innocuous- looking envelopes mailed from their local post office.
Perhaps their customers included innocents such as young Jemma Longthorp. At any rate, it was certainly a lucrative business.
When the couple’s home was raided, officers found $70,000 worth of watches, $44,000 in cash and a 9mm machine gun.
Of course, buying fentanyl from this type of crude home laboratory is like playing Russian roulette. Making it is an exact science, and the concentration — and hence its potency — can vary widely.
The risk of ‘very sudden death’ was spelt out this week by Ian Cruxton of the NCA. ‘With heroin, people may slowly fade into unconsciousness,’ he said. ‘With fentanyl, people have dropped dead just like that.’
In the Kent town of Deal, Michelle Fraser rues that none of this was widely known last November, when her 18-year- old son, Robert, was handed a wrap of white powder by a drug dealer who had previously supplied him with cannabis.
‘It’s really good stuff. Give it a try,’ the pusher assured him, according to two of Robert’s friends who were also offered the mystery substance.
When the trio inhaled some of the white powder, it made them all so sick that they agreed to throw the rest away.
BUT
Robert, a gentle — and somewhat lost — 6 ft 5 in giant who was out of work and spent most of his time skateboarding, took it back to his father’s house, where he was staying.
Three days later, grieving for his beloved grandmother (who had died a few days earlier), he apparently decided to try it again.
The next morning, when his father Graeme found him dead in bed, two lines of the powder were set out on a hardback book on the table beside him: a biography of his hero, Bob Marley.
A coroner later ruled that he had died accidentally from an overdose of fentanyl.
But Robert’s mother, who saw his body and has since read extensively about the drug, is convinced he died simply by handling it.
Mrs Fraser, 48, says: ‘The fentanyl could have seeped through his skin, or he might have breathed in a few grains accidentally.
‘I’ve lost my Robert and 59 other people have died, but I’m afraid this is something we’re going to be reading a lot more about.’
At home in Oxford, Mr Longthorp concurs. He says it is still a mystery where his daughter Jemma bought the drugs that killed her.
‘She got most of the stuff from Holland and America. I understand that merely supplying these drugs in this way is not actually illegal.
‘We don’t know the exact supplier, because we can’t get into Jemma’s iPad — we haven’t got the password. But there were tablets and there was white powder.’
He, too, fears there will be many more deaths.
Given the appalling statistics that emerged here this week, and the trail of destruction across America, such fears would seem to be well-founded.