Officials confirm deadly opioid now in country
Already trapped in the “eye of a deadly storm” of opioid abuse, Canada has now confirmed overdose fatalities due to the hyper-deadly drug carfentanil.
For what is believed to be the first time in this country, Alberta officials revealed Friday that two deceased men in their 30s tested positive for the synthetic substance, which is 100 times more toxic than fentanyl and 10,000 times deadlier than morphine.
One of the overdoses occurred in Calgary, the other in the Edmonton area.
“We are already in the eye of a deadly storm in fighting the horrific impacts of fentanyl in our communities,” said Deputy Commissioner Marianne Ryan, the RCMP’s commanding officer in Alberta.
“We are now even more challenged by the arrival of carfentanil on our streets.”
The discovery signals another dark chapter in the fight against such potent painkillers as Fentanyl, a drug that killed 153 people in Alberta in the first half of 2016, 14 more than in the same period last year.
The two men overdosed last summer and the presence of carfentanil in their blood was confirmed Tuesday, using tests available to few jurisdictions in North America, said Dr. Elizabeth Brooks-Lim, Alberta’s acting Chief Medical Examiner.
Until very recently, toxicology tests could not confirm the existence of carfentanil due to the very low level of the drug required to be deadly.
“To my knowledge, there are very few laboratories in North America that are able to measure carfentanil in human blood,” Brooks-Lim said. Alberta’s Chief Medical Examiner’s office is believed to be the first lab in Canada to do so, she said.
“With two cases now having been identified, it is prudent to inform Albertans about this health safety concern — this is a very dangerous illicit drug,” she said.
It’s highly possible unreported cases of carfentanil deaths have occurred, she added.
Carfentanil is an opioid drug licensed for use with large animals like elephants, but not for humans. An amount the size of a grain of sand could prove lethal, said Dr. Karen Grimsrud, Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health.
The drug kills by suppressing the user’s respiratory functions, starving the brain of oxygen.
Opioid users — a community that stretches from the chronically addicted to the homeless and those residing in suburbia — may not know what they’re ingesting, said Grimsrud. One of the two fatalities tested positive for both Fentanyl and carfentanil.
RCMP Supt. Yvon de Champlain reported that authorities in August seized a kilogram of carfentanil that had arrived in Canada from China.
“That had the potential to produce 50 million doses,” he said, adding the damage that amount could wreak “is difficult to comprehend.”
De Champlain said a potent profit motive driven by the considerable value of such tiny amounts is a challenge faced by law enforcement.
“We know this is a huge problem and we’re doing everything we can to counteract it,” he said. “Everyone has a stake in this.”
Despite the dangers, Chinese vendors offer to sell carfentanil openly online, for worldwide export, no questions asked, an Associated Press investigation revealed Friday. The AP identified 12 Chinese businesses that said they would export carfentanil to Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and Australia for as little as $2,750 a kilogram.
Carfentanil burst into view in the United States this summer. In the Detroit area alone, there have been 19 deaths related to Carfentanil since July, local health officials said Thursday.
In China, the top global source of synthetic drugs, carfentanil is not a controlled substance. The U.S. government is pressing China to blacklist it, but Beijing has yet to act.