OD deaths in Cincinnati: Isolating the killer
The Hamilton County coroner is trying to isolate the killer in three deaths among scores of recent overdoses.
Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco said Friday that she might have found a way: She hopes to have a sample of the large-animal opioid carfentanil by next week, so local officials will have a sample to compare and a way to identify if the drug is involved in the local overdoses.
She said Summit County, which has suffered deaths from carfentanil-laced heroin, has offered to provide a sample. The drug is a mega-potent opioid, intended for animals including elephants. The carfentanil now on the streets as heroin has been largely manufactured overseas, narcotics agents say, shipped to Mexico or Canada and moved to other locales such as Ohio.
The Cincinnati overdoses continued Friday in an unprecedented week of such emergency runs in the city. Police responded to 11 reported overdoses, but no one had died, as of 10 p.m. That followed a six-day rash of overdoses that numbered about 174 in hospital emergency rooms.
Most of the people overdosed on the west side of Cincinnati, but one death was in Hamilton County. The city usually has about four overdose runs per day. In neighboring Northern Kentucky, St. Elizabeth Healthcare emergency-room staff were reporting a surge, but not to the degree Cincinnati has seen.
Police are still asking for the public's help in identifying the source of the purported heroin.
The coroner and police suspect carfentanil or the painkiller fentanyl – or another variation of that drug, furanylfentanyl – is causing the overdoses. Even worse, furanylfentanyl is not a controlled substance in the United States.
All of these have been found in heroin in the area, and fentanyl is responsible for a jump of overdoses throughout Greater Cincinnati, as well as in Northern Kentucky and across the nation.
The Hamilton County Heroin Coalition warned of carfentanil in July. At that time, Sammarco said that multiple doses of naloxone, the overdose antidote, would be needed to restore breathing in victims.
It is not simple to get a sample of carfentanil, Sammarco said, and she's still not promising that her office will receive it next week.
She said she initially asked the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens for a sample, but "they didn't have any."
The Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI helped figure out a plan, and Sammarco said the office of U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, also helped. The law enforcement agents tried to acquire a sample from Canada. But Sammarco said there would be a weeks-long delay in going through the appropriate channels to get the sample to Cincinnati.
"I couldn't have that," she said.
That's when Summit County came through.
But the coroner has other options lined up, too. "If for whatever reason this falls through, we've already got feelers out," Sammarco said.