New equipment aims to help crime lab

This year the Lake County Crime Laboratory has found at least six types of fentanyl analogues appearing here for the first time.

Crime Lab Supervisor of Chemistry & Toxicology Douglas Rohde said there are about 400 types of fentanyl analogues and the county has seen about 50 of them.

Rohde said the opioid epidemic is the biggest crisis the county faces right now.

“We have to approach this as a combined effort with a community approach,” he said. “Each one

of us in the county have our duty.”

A new piece of equipment purchased by the crime lab will help them with their duty more effectively, he said.

The Lake County commissioners approved the purchase of a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer with an autosampler at their most recent meeting. The crime lab is purchasing the device from Wilmington, Delaware-based Agilent Technologies for just under $70,000. The device

is being paid for with a grant received by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

Rohde said with the instrument, they’ll be able to turn around cases quicker, allowing law enforcement, the coroner and others to sooner know what’s on the street.

“Our backlog is crippling,” he said. “I find myself in the crime lab on the weekend much more than I should. It’s just necessary to keep up with the volume.”

What they’re identifying today are cases from two or three months ago. That’s not acceptable, Rohde said.

“We have to have better turnaround time and this

new piece of equipment will allow that,” he said.

Lake County’s lab was the first in the state to identify U-47700, an opioid analgesic drug developed by a team at Upjohn in the 1970s that was never sold commercially but is now being made in Chinese labs.

The lab identified U-47700 as the drug that killed a 29-year-old in January 2016. Authorities learned that he had the drugs shipped from China after purchasing it over the Internet. At that time it was legal, Rohde said. He worked with the Sheriff’s Office and the Ohio Pharmacy Board, which in turn worked with Gov. John Kasich

to schedule the drug within six weeks.

The $130,000 grant received from the Attorney General’s Office will also help fund safety improvement in a lab that now carries 12 units of the opioidreversal antidote naloxone on hand in case of accidental exposure.

“Things are very different at the laboratory; we’re going to need to make safety changes, building a different wall to keep those drugs isolated from the rest of the laboratory,” Crime Lab Director Linda Erdei told commissioners in February. “There’s a lot of concern about safety at the laboratory.”