Fentanyl fueling Cobb’s drug-related deaths

MARIETTA — Though it was four overdose deaths in central Georgia that grabbed the headlines last month, highlighting the danger of the synthetic opioid known as fentanyl, the powerful drug has notched dozens of deaths in Cobb in recent months.

Cobb authorities fear the drug’s increasing prevalence could increase the negative impact of opioid addiction in the community.

Fentanyl, which can be prescribed by a physician, is similar to morphine but 50 to 100 times more potent and is typically used to treat patients with severe pain or to manage pain after surgery, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Due to its potency, health officials and law enforcement agencies warn that merely touching or inhaling tiny amounts as small as a grain of salt can cause a person to suffer an immediate drug overdose.

But NIDA said the drug and its analogues that have sparked the majority of recent overdoses are often produced in clandestine laboratories and may be sold as a powder, spiked on blotter paper, formed into tablets that resemble less potent drugs or mixed with or substituted for heroin.

It’s the latter form that has led to a growing number of deaths in Cobb. According to the Cobb County Medical Examiner’s Office’s 2016 report, the county saw 141 drug- and alcohol-related deaths last year. More than half of those deaths, 73, involved fentanyl, heroin or both. Fentanyl alone was attributed to 35 deaths, more than double the 16 tallied in 2015, while six deaths tested positive for both fentanyl and heroin.

Twenty-eight of 2016’s fentanyl and/or heroin-related deaths came in the last three months of the year — the highest number of such deaths in Cobb to date — while last year’s total death toll related to the two drugs was up from 57 such deaths in 2015.

“This isn’t teenagers experimenting. We still got a good spike in the 20s, the 18-29 group is a pretty substantial group, but our biggest group is in the 30s,” says Dr. Christopher Gulledge, Cobb’s medical examiner, referring to the overall drug-related deaths investigated by his office.

Of the 141 deaths tallied in 2016, 44 deaths were individuals in their 30s, the age group that saw the most deaths, compared to 34 deaths of those aged 18 to 29. Only one drugrelated death occurred with someone between the ages of 12 and 17.

Of the remaining groups, 18 deaths were individuals in their 40s, 29 in their 50s, while 15 deaths were tallied by those between the ages of 60 and 79.