10,000 times deadlier than heroin
. . . and it’s killed 15 people in a small UK city in just a few weeks. So why should you care if a few junkies fall victim to the new ‘opioid’ epidemic? Because in the US it has sent 64,000 to the morgue
SHORTLY after l unchtime, as drizzle fell outside at the start of a week without work, Paddy Colby told his father that he was going to watch television in his bedroom. He trudged upstairs, closed the door and killed himself.
The cheerful handyman and stepfather did not mean to die. Once in his bedroom, he took out a ‘wrap’ of heroin he had bought – a drug which sells on the streets of Hull for £10. Then he put the powder in citric acid, heated it up and injected it into his body.
After years of addiction, Colby, 39, might have noticed the drug was more soluble than usual and the liquid had a strange reddish hue. But it hit him so fast that when his stepmother found his body three hours later, the syringe was still in his hand. For the ‘wrap’ he bought was not just heroin. It had been mixed with two lethal manmade opioids – fentanyl, a painkiller 100 times more potent than morphine; and carfentanyl, an elephant tranquilliser 10,000 times stronger than street heroin.
These are the synthetic drugs carving such a deadly course across the United States, an epidemic that left 64,000 people dead last year, including rock star Prince. This year’s death toll may double.
Now the drugs have arrived in Britain – and a spate of sudden deaths in Hull, the worst incident in the UK so far, shows their devastating impact. Just a few grains of carfentanyl – 0.00002g – can be fatal.
Colby was one of at least 15 peo- ple – and possibly more than 20 – killed in Hull and the surrounding area in just a few weeks.
Their lives ended after heroin was mixed with the synthetic opioids, which are made in laboratories abroad, bought on the internet and sold at vast profit. In another case, six people were killed on one side of a street in Stockton, Teesside, earlier this year. These lethal drugs have begun cropping up across the country – first found in Blyth, Northumberland, then suspected in deaths and drug busts from Leeds to London, St Albans to Southampton, Wakefield to Winchester, and Wales to Northern Ireland.
This feels eerily familiar to me after reporting two months ago
‘These new drugs are the tip of an iceberg’