The heroin epidemic that has plagued the nation’s urban and rural communities alike had not spared West Virginia, but nothing prepared Cabell County officials for 26 overdoses in a four-hour span last week.
(FOX)- The wave of misery was focused in a Huntington public housing complex, where victims injected from a batch of the drug believed to have been laced with Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid up to 100 times more potent than morphine. Investigators believe two fatalities that occurred during the same time period could be related.
“We have never seen anything like this before to this magnitude,” said Gordon Merry, Emergency Management Service director for Cabell County.
It was the latest cluster of overdoses to take place in communities ranging from gritty cities to rural farmlands. Overdoses involving heroin and synthetic drugs like “spice” left two dozen hospitalized earlier this month in Ohio; killed two and sickened 16 two months ago in New Haven, Conn.; and hospitalized 33 last month in Brooklyn.
Just last week, nine people overdosed on heroin from a single bad batch, with one woman dying. And twice in the last week, paramedics have rushed to Los Angeles’ Skid Row to treat multiple people sicked by synthetic marijuana.
Incidents of large-scale overdoses bring headlines, but public health and law enforcement officials say the opioid crisis gripping the nation claims most of its victims quietly, one or two at a time. In Cabell County, there have been at least 440 overdoses this year, including 26 fatalities.