Hold the presses; barometric pressure and chronic pain
Q: I heard there was a big influx of counterfeit prescription pills on the market—pills that look like the real thing but are fake. Is that true, and how dangerous is it?—Jason D., Annandale, Maryland
A: It is true. Since there’s been a crackdown in Florida and elsewhere on pill mills that cranked out scripts for legally manufactured pain pills, and because responsible doctors are growing more conservative about prescribing them to patients, there’s been an increase in made-in-the-U.S.A. counterfeit pills.
The Drug Enforcement Agency says that an influx of pill-making machines is what’s pushing these deadly counterfeit drugs onto our streets. Industrial-grade pill presses can turn out 170,000 pills per minute, while handheld ones can press only a dozen at a time.
The worst part of it is that fake pills—masquerading as prescription painkillers, like Oxycodone, hydrocodone, Percocet and Xanax—often are laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl is 25 to 50 times more powerful than heroin and is responsible for thousands and thousands of accidental overdoses.
Recently, DEA agents in San Francisco followed a delivery of a suspicious industrial pill press to a home, where they found five more presses and 30 pounds of synthetic fentanyl. One law-enforcement agent said that if someone had just 1 kilogram of fentanyl (wholesale $3,500 to $5,000), a pill press (about $1,000) and the binding material, they could potentially make $10 million worth of fake pills. Hello, “Breaking Bad.”
Most pill presses and syn- thetic fentanyl are made in China. So Chuck Rosenberg, an administrator for the DEA, went to China last January and met with officials about keeping synthetic fentanyl and pill presses from being shipped illegally to the U.S. Let’s hope trade relations stay friendly enough that they will agree to step up.
In the meantime, if you’re dependent on opioid pain pills, see your doctor about getting treatment for your addiction, and do not buy these drugs on the black market. There’s likely no second chance with a fentanyl-laced fake.