Elephant sedative the next danger

US authorities seeing heroin cut with drug

Consider this: A 10-milligram dose of the animal tranquilizer carfentanil is powerful enough to sedate, even kill, a 15,000-pound African elephant, and more than strong enough to take down a musk ox, bull moose or fully grown buffalo.

If diluted sufficiently, a dose of the same size — just the fraction of the weight of a paper clip — could also send 500 humans to the morgue.

So when authorities say they’re worried about kilograms’ worth of the drug making their way into the North American heroin supply, they mean it.

Carfentanil is the most potent commercial opioid in the world — 10,000 times stronger than morphine — and law enforcement from northwest Canada to the eastern United States have raised alarms about it tainting heroin batches, and even being sold as the drug itself.

Heroin cut with carfentanil offers a harder-hitting, longer-lasting high and allows dealers a shortcut to increase their supplies. But users often don’t know what they’re getting. In recent months, authorities have linked carfentanil to a spike in overdoses in several states.

The emergence of carfentanil poses a new set of problems for drug enforcement officers, who are already spread thin fighting a nationwide epidemic of opioid addiction. With heroin, authorities have struggled to contain the spread of fentanyl, a more powerful heroin cousin that has killed thousands of users in recent years — perhaps most famously Prince in April. Now, carfentanil is on the radar too. “You feel like a kid with his finger in the dike, you know?”Joseph Pinjuh, a Department of Justice drug task force chief based in Ohio, told the Associated Press. “We’re running out of fingers.”

Recently, Canadian law enforcement agencies announced charges against a man they said was supposed to be on the receiving end of a 1-kilogram package of carfentanil shipped from China earlier in the summer.

In a news conference Tuesday, the Canadian Border Services Agency and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they found the drug hidden in a box labeled as printer accessories and addressed to a man in Calgary. They charged the man, age 24, with one count of importing a controlled substance and one count of possession for the purpose of trafficking.

The package, authorities said, could have produced 50 million doses.

“It is hard to imagine what the impact could have been if even the smallest amounts of this drug were to have made its way to the street,” Canadian Border Services Regional Director Roslyn MacVicar said in a statement.

In the United States, Ohio has been ground-zero for the drug’s appearance. Last month, prosecutors indicted a Columbus man they claim passed off a batch of the drug as heroin, causing 10 overdoses, one of them fatal. Rayshon Alexander has pleaded not guilty to 20 counts, including murder and drug trafficking.

Also in July, police in Akron, Ohio, reported that paramedics had logged 236 drug overdoses in a three week period — nearly as many as they had seen in all of the first half of the year, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. Police in the city’s suburbs reported similar trends, the Beacon Journal reported.

The rise in overdoses has prompted Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine to urge police to stop field testing drugs on the scene, out of fear that they could be handling substances much more powerful than they realize. “It’s just too high of a risk,” DeWine said, according to the Columbus Dispatch. “This stuff is just now hitting. You’re really not seeing (police) departments with any experience with it at all.”