Police seized sufficient fentanyl from one trafficker in Lawrence to finish the lives of 566,000 individuals.
A collaborative investigation between the Massachusetts State Police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration final Wednesday ended with the seizure of greater than a kilo of fentanyl — wrapped up in aluminum foil like a burrito, in response to pictures supplied by the State Police — from a single alleged trafficker.
Police arrested Jacobo Medina-Mendoza, 39, of Lawrence, that day and he was later arraigned on associated fees at Lawrence District Court.
Police say that the package deal contained 1,132 grams of fentanyl. The DEA states that they take into account any dose of two milligrams or bigger to be a probably deadly dose, that means that the package deal was able to killing as many as 566,000 individuals, relying on their measurement and weight.
That’s 245 occasions the quantity of people that the state confirmed useless from opioid-related overdoses final yr alone — 2,310, a record-high for the state and a quantity that’s itself 2 ½ occasions bigger than the yr earlier than, in response to state knowledge. While the state wants a couple of months to verify instances, there have been already 522 estimated overdose deaths this yr as of the top of March, which is the most recent out there knowledge.
That’s in comparison with the 80,411 Americans usually who died from overdosing on opioids in 2021, a 17% enhance over the 68,630 Americans who overdosed and died the yr earlier than, in response to knowledge from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The DEA and the Centers for Disease Control each say fentanyl is as much as 100 occasions extra highly effective than the pure opiate morphine. Medical medical doctors prescribe such a powerful painkiller, the DEA says, “to treat patients with chronic severe pain or severe pain following surgery,” however latest federal convictions of pharmaceutical bosses present that wasn’t at all times the case — and each the pharmaceutical firm executives and the medical doctors have been lining their pockets with blood cash.
Those embrace main strikes towards Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin which observers have stated helped gas the opioid epidemic, which has been appealed backwards and forwards with the Supreme Court most lately blocking a deal that will have shielded the corporate’s homeowners, the Sackler household, from opioid-related civil claims.
It additionally included, in Boston, the conviction of John Kapoor, the founding father of Insys Therapeutics, who acquired 5 ½ years in federal jail for, because the feds summarized, “orchestrating a scheme to bribe practitioners to prescribe Subsys, a fentanyl-based pain medication, often when medically unnecessary.”
With such overwhelming numbers of useless within the opioid disaster, the state on Tuesday granted $350,000 to fund and develop an Overdose Prevention Helpline, which is run since 2020 by Boston Medical Center and RIZE Massachusetts, which Gov. Maura Healey’s administration acknowledged makes Massachusetts the primary state within the nation to fund such a hotline.
With the funding, the administration reiterated its dedication to its technique of “harm reduction,” in response to its press launch, because the variety of useless climbed to file ranges. The state handed out some 120,000 doses of naloxone, the drug that reverses overdoses, administered to nearly 30,000 individuals.
The administration has despatched individuals out among the many tent metropolis of Mass and Cass, the middle of Boston’s opioid epidemic and the place space leaders are saying is changing into a regional assortment zone for homeless addicts, to get the phrase out in regards to the Helpline, which will be reached at 800-972-0590.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”