AN ULTRA-LETHAL DRUG SPREADS THROUGH JERSEY

Authorities Alarmed As The Toll Of Fentanyl-Laced Heroin Soars

Drug dealing in Camden, where daily life is a brutal business, rarely
registers a yawn. But the drug that killed three young men and
hospitalized 42 others in South Jersey last weekend has shattered the
usual indifference.

The killer cocktail: heroin laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate
that is 80 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

Ten and $20 bags of the substance are easy to come by on the streets
of North Camden. Dealers market the high-octane heroin under names
such as "Flatline," "Knockout" and "Get High or Die." And the
advertising is proving all too genuine, with hundreds of deaths
reported across the country since 2005.

While the South Jersey-Philadelphia region has recorded 70
fentanyl-related fatalities in the past year, there is evidence the
epidemic has slowly snaked its way along New Jersey's coast since
January. From Camden to Ocean to Monmouth to Middlesex to Bergen to
Hudson and finally to Passaic, victims of fentanyl-adulterated heroin
(and occasionally cocaine) have ended up in county morgues.

"What a lot of people don't know is that 125 micrograms -- that's
about four grains of salt -- is enough to create an overdose effect,"
said Jerry Daley, director of a Camden-Philadelphia drug trafficking
program, operated out of the White House's Office of National Drug
Control Policy. "And (when mixed into heroin or cocaine) it's not
readily visible to the eye, taste or smell."

While fentanyl has been legally used for decades in anesthesia and
pain management (New Brunswick's Johnson & Johnson patented the
Duragesic transdermal patch 16 years ago), the fentanyl found in the
tainted heroin, say drug and law enforcement officials, is
manufactured illegally.

A Rapid Death

The narcotic is a quick killer that users can smoke, snort or inject.

Earlier this year, a victim was found in a fast-food restaurant in
St. Louis, the syringe still in his arm. In Michigan, a dozen people
in one room were found passed out, overdosed on fentanyl-tainted heroin.

And last Sunday, at Camden County's Riviera Motor Inn, the body of
30-year-old James MacDonald was found in a standing position inside
his motel room, bent over at the waist and leaning against the door.
A bag filled with powder labeled "Chemistry" was discovered nearby.

"With an overdose of fentanyl -- and it doesn't take much -- you just
stop breathing," said Steve Marcus, executive director of the New
Jersey Poison Information and Education System. "It also has a funny
habit of tightening the muscles in the chest so you can't breathe --
like drowning. It's not a nice high. Either you pass out, you get
muscle contractions in your chest, or you die."

Tim Ogden, an agent in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, last
week told a gathering of officials from a dozen states, including New
Jersey, that the problem of fentanyl abuse has not yet been
adequately addressed.

"In my almost 30 years of law enforcement experience, I haven't seen
a threat that concerns me this much," he said.

Menace Spreads

Sporadic, but localized, clusters of fentanyl-related deaths have
been reported since the late 1970s. What alarms law enforcement and
public health experts now is that the tainted heroin seems to be
spreading all across the country.

In Detroit, 33 people died in just one week in May. In Cook County,
Chicago, 55 have died since the beginning of the year. Delaware,
Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania -- all have confirmed
fentanyl-related deaths.

With more than 250 victims nationwide, even the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention is now investigating what it calls an
"outbreak." In late May, when a team was sent to Detroit to gather
information, Bernadette Burden, a CDC spokeswoman, told reporters,
"This is new territory for CDC investigators."

A Lack Of Interest

Public awareness of the problem, however, is practically nonexistent.

"It struck me as amazing, the lack of interest," said Marcus, who
also is a professor of Preventive Medicine and Community Health at
UMDNJ. "In general, people out there have an attitude of, well, drug
addicts know what they're doing is dangerous ... but there are people
out there dying who shouldn't be."

Compounding the problem, says Marcus, is the difficulty in getting
accurate statistics. For example, medical examiners in Chicago and
Detroit began testing for minute levels of fentanyl (hard to detect
through standard toxicology tests), only when the deaths started mounting.

"There is nobody, to my knowledge, putting this together, either in
the state or in the nation," said Marcus. "And we're not exactly
being proactive in New Jersey."

That may be changing. On Tuesday, officials from Philadelphia and
Camden County, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI and
Philadelphia's behavioral health department agreed to coordinate
their investigations into fentanyl-related deaths.

North Jersey, however, is just starting to take notice.

"A doctor in the ER at University Hospital told me two weeks ago that
he saw eight drug overdoses in just one weekend," Marcus said. "He
couldn't be sure that it was the tainted heroin, but it was an
unusually large number of overdoses that had to be treated with an antidote."

Newark health officials were alarmed enough to call a meeting about
fentanyl earlier this month with representatives from law
enforcement, emergency medicine and substance abuse programs.

Seeking The Source

The source of the drug continues to baffle experts.

Since 2000, five illicit fentanyl labs have been taken, four of them
in California and one in suburban Newton Square, Pennsylvania,
according to the National Drug Intelligence Center.

Last week, agents from the DEA and the Chicago Police Department
arrested 29 alleged members of a street gang suspected of trafficking
fentanyl-laced heroin.

In May, agents from the Mexican Federal Investigative Agency and the
Organized Crime Division of the Mexican Attorney General's Office
raided a lab in Toluca, Mexico. U.S. officials believe it was a main
source of the fentanyl-laced heroin that found its way to the streets
of Camden, Chicago and Detroit.

As to whether that lab was the source of the lethal drugs that
hospitalized dozens and killed three in Camden County last weekend,
Daley demurs.

"To my knowledge there is no way of confirming, right now, that the
product on the street is related to Toluca, but it's believed some
had already been shipped out before the lab was broken up."

The symptoms of overdose survivors provide a clue.

"There are similarities between them -- respiratory distress,
seizures and then they pass out," said Bill Shralow, spokesman for
the Camden County prosecutor's office. "We have heroin overdoses once
or twice a week here, but when you have dozens in just a couple of
days and three deaths, it looks more and more like what we saw a few
months ago."

In response to the rash of overdoses, Camden police on Monday
arrested 39 people trying to buy heroin in the city. Twenty-four
hours later, 51 more were arrested, caught in the exact same location.

"Remarkably, even the most recent heroin-related fatalities have not
stopped people from coming to Camden to buy drugs," said acting
Camden County Prosecutor James P. Lynch.

Several of the residents at the Riviera Motor Inn, just a few miles
from Camden City, admit that there is a steady stream of users and
dealers in the area.

Maintenance man Hector Flores, who found the body, knew MacDonald
only in passing. "He seemed like an ordinary guy, a nice guy" said
Flores. "I felt bad. I mean, he was somebody's dad, somebody's
brother. ... It was a wasted life."