In some of these cases, overdose victims were also found to have taken fentanyl, xylazine, and other drugs.
Alex J. Krotulski, an associate director at the Center for Forensic Science Research Education, holds a sample of nitazene powder. Analogues of the powerful synthetic opioid have been detected in drug samples and in overdose deaths in Philadelphia recently, health officials here say.
In a health alert released last month, city officials told medical providers that they had detected a number of nitazene analogues in overdose victims since December 2022. It’s difficult to say exactly how many people have died of nitazene-related overdoses since they first turned up in the city, said Daniel Teixeira da Silva, the medical director of the city health department’s division of substance use prevention and harm reduction.
It’s unclear whether those drugs were combined by dealers and sold together, health officials say, or whether victims combined them knowingly. “It’s really this continuing trend of when you’re using dope that you’ve bought off the street, you really don’t know what you’re using,” Teixeira said. “We have stronger synthetic opioids and multiple sedatives in these samples.”, up to 50 times more powerful than heroin, in the mid-2010s. Soon fentanyl had largely replaced heroin in the city’s illicit opioid market.Now health officials say that nitazene analogues are adding new dangers to the drug supply.
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