Powerful street drug concern for responders
Alberta communities have been hard hit by fentanyl, with more than 225 deaths attributed to the powerful street drug last year.
But there’s a new drug hitting the streets, Lethbridge-area social workers were warned this week. And harm reduction educator Jill Manning reported it’s 100 times stronger.
Discovered years ago in a Calgary research lab — and then forgotten — it’s called W-18. Manning told a professional forum the superstrength opiate has somehow been rediscovered and added to the list of drugs sold on Calgary streets.
It hasn’t yet been detected in Lethbridge, she indicated. But it’s so new, first responders don’t know yet whether overdose victims will respond to the Naloxone injections now widely used to revive fentanyl users.
But with fentanyl becoming so widely used, she said, overdose recovery kits are readily available in Lethbridge and elsewhere in the province.
Southern Alberta has seen more than its share of fentanyl deaths, Manning pointed out during a presentation organized by the Social Work Professional Development Partnership here. It’s readily available because Lethbridge is close to supplies from the U.S., and directly east of the drug-pourous docks in Vancouver harbour.
Manning, a staff member at the city’s Arches harm reduction agency, explained fentanyl drug can’t be detected by trained drugsniffing dogs and it may be added to other street drugs like marijuana — dipped into a liquid form — with sometimes fatal results. That practice came to the public’s attention, she said, when a British Columbia couple died after taking a hit on what they believed was an ordinary marijuana cigarette.
For Canadians who want to avoid contact with serious drugs, Manning said, selling tested and legalized marijuana in the same way as other social drugs could save lives. So can increased awareness of fentanyl’s dangers, Manning suggested, as Lethbridge residents realized after a high school athlete died of an overdose last summer.
Naloxone kits are available free, she said, and can be used by anyone with basic training as a way to keep someone alive while an ambulance is on the way. The antidote doesn’t interact with other medications, she added, and has no negative side-effects.