Deaths caused by fentanyl are officially recorded as overdoses. But to Colorado District Attorney Brian Mason, it was a poisoning that hit Apt. 307.
On Presidents’ Day weekend, what was then the nation’s largest known mass fentanyl poisoning hit his district.
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The Denver area was becoming a transportation hub for the synthetic opioid. Mason had been warning people for months about deadly fentanyl mixed into recreational drugs.
Now, five more people were dead. wapo.st/3BBHwhO
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Mason learned that dealers have been taking advantage of fentanyl powder’s abundance and supreme potency to “spike” their cocaine, heroin and meth. But in some cases, street dealers do not even know that fentanyl is in the cocaine they are selling.
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A Post analysis of CDC data found that in 2021, fentanyl was involved in 74% of heroin deaths, 71% of cocaine deaths and 54% of meth deaths. Yearly cocaine fatalities over the past decade have quintupled, and 90% of that rise can be explained by fentanyl.
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Law enforcement officials think many more mass poisonings have not been counted. But the U.S. government does not track mass-overdose events — not the DEA, the CDC or the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
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More than 107,000 people died in the United States last year by overdosing on illegal drugs.
That is the country’s highest figure ever. Two-thirds of the deaths were attributed to fentanyl.
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This is the story of the five lives that were taken in Apt. 307, the investigation into what was then the nation’s largest-known mass fentanyl poisoning, and how the addictive opioid has unleashed the most lethal narcotics crisis in U.S. history.
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If only we knew where the vast majority of illicit fentanyl comes from.
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hey mark! we have a whole piece about that very subject and the investigation as a whole. it has some really interesting data:
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107,000(!) That is about equal to number of Russian casualties in the Ukraine war
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The population total is also the highest ever. A percentage or per capita rate would be more Mrs higher than raw figures.
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Why does the upper Midwest through Texas not have the number of deaths that show in most other areas of the country? Not that I want them to have more deaths obviously but just is striking.
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Look at the exponential rise in just four years. Your Society is no longer sick. Your society is dying.