FENTANYL MADE IN ILLEGAL LABS

Chemical tests show pain drug suspected in overdose deaths wasn't
made same way as prescription forms.

Doses of the painkiller fentanyl, thought to be the cause of dozens
of drug overdose deaths in Metro Detroit in the past two weeks,
appear to have been made illegally in underground laboratories,
people familiar with an expanding police investigation said Wednesday.

The findings are based on chemical tests that indicate the fentanyl
- -- a powerful pain medication -- was not made the same way as the
prescription forms of the drug, said Calvin Trent, director of the
Detroit Bureau of Substance Abuse. He and others said investigators
laid out those findings at a meeting with health officials Wednesday
morning, though they offered few details.

"They've confirmed it's being clandestinely manufactured, but not in
the Detroit or Wayne County area," Trent said. "It appears that the
fentanyl was not made here or mixed here, but it was brought here and
sold here."

Authorities suspect the painkiller, mixed with either heroin or
cocaine, is to blame for a spike in drug overdose deaths involving 50
people in Wayne County during the past two weeks, including two on Wednesday.

They will not be able to definitively link the deaths to fentanyl
until they complete toxicology tests, which can take several weeks.
Since January 2005, the county has confirmed 130 fentanyl overdose deaths.

Other cases have been confirmed from Philadelphia to Chicago; a
handful have been reported elsewhere in Michigan.

"There's still a lot of questions, but all evidence points to it
being a mix that came onto the street from illegal networks," said
Dr. Mark Greenwald, a Wayne State University psychiatry professor who
is part of a task force of health officials and others assembled to
respond to the overdoses.

Police seizures of the lethal cocktail in Detroit indicate it comes
in varying strains, Greenwald said. Some drug mixes contained mostly
fentanyl and some heroin; in others, the ratio was reversed.. Experts
said prescription versions of fentanyl are chemically different from
illegally produced versions and that tests can tell the two apart.

Carolyn Gibson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, said investigators won't say conclusively the drugs
were illegally manufactured until all their tests are complete.

"We'd be premature in saying it's 100 percent definite, but that's
what it's looking like," she said. Police in Philadelphia, where
fentanyl has been blamed for about 40 deaths over two months, said
they also suspect the drug was made illegally and that it was mixed
into packets of heroin before reaching the city. They think all
originated from one shipment of tainted heroin that was distributed
to cities in the Northeast and Midwest, Philadelphia Police Lt. Pat Quinn said.

Illegal fentanyl labs have been around for at least 20 years, but are
exceedingly rare because the process requires advanced knowledge of
chemistry, said Tom Abercrombie, an Oakland, Calif., crime laboratory
criminalist supervisor, who has investigated two such labs.