Some still hospitalized, but no new cases

Some of the 101 patients who overdosed after ingesting a yet-to-beidentified drug cocktail remained hospitalized Thursday but are improving, Berks County’s chief detective said.

Even better, Chief Michael J. Gombar said Thursday afternoon, no new cases have been reported by local health officials since a press conference was called by District Attorney John T. Adams on Tuesday.

Adams issued a public health alert Monday in the wake of a weekend that saw about 70 overdose patients treated in local hospitals after they ingested a powerful drug cocktail that included a tranquilizer used by veterinarians to sedate horses. By noon Tuesday, the overdoses increased to 101.

Adams was joined by Dr. William Santoro, chief of the division of addiction medicine at Tower Health, and Council on Chemical Abuse Executive Director Stanley J. Papademetriou in Tuesday’s conference.

Santoro described the situation as more of a poisoning than a mass overdose.

Officials believe an unidentified substance in the drug cocktail — in addition to the other substances including the horse tranquilizer xylazine — caused the worst symptoms.

Santoro said that after patients used one bag they become tired and fell asleep for a lengthy period. When they woke up, they were disoriented, had trouble walking, were weak and with a slow heart rate and high blood pressure, he said.

The mystery substance was resistant to naloxone, an opioid antidote better known by the brand name Narcan, which is carried in vehicles of emergency responders because it’s highly effective at reversing opioid overdoses.

Multiple specimens have been sent to a specialty lab in an effort to determine what is in the drugs.

Since Sunday, officers from the Reading Police Department and the district attorney’s office have conducted three searches in the city.

Two of the three raids recovered 500 blue bags that contained heroin, fentanyl and other drugs, Adams said.

“The blue bags seem to be the bags that contain the substances that are causing all of the overdoses in our community,” Adams said at Tuesday’s conference.

The blue bags contained what are believed to be heroin, fentanyl, lidocaine, xylazine and clonidine.

Asked Thursday if the public health crisis is over, Gombar said it’s too early to say, but it looks promising.

The lack of new overdoses of the mysterious cocktail may be the result of addicts steering away from drugs in blue bags, or there could be no more of that cocktail available with the recent raids and arrests of those who were suspected of distributing the poisonous concoction.

“From what we did in the city of Reading, hopefully we got all that product off the streets,” he said.