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BY BOB KASARDA
bkasarda@nwitimes.com
219.462.5151 | Wednesday, February 08, 2006 | (No comments posted.)
Chicago police believe a highly potent painkiller may be to blame for the recent spike in deaths among heroin users on the city's south side.
While there has been talk about a possible link between those deaths and a few recent overdoses in Porter County, Chicago police spokesperson Monique Bond said there is no evidence the problem has spread beyond Chicago.
The cancer drug suspected in the deaths is Fentanyl, which is 80 times more potent than morphine and up to hundreds of times stronger than the heroin with which it may be mixed in these cases, Bond said.
Police are still waiting on laboratory results to confirm their suspicion, she said. But Fentanyl has been a problem in the past and the symptoms in the recent overdoses are similar to the earlier experiences with the drug, she said.
Porter County Drug Task Force Coordinator Bob Taylor planned to seek lab tests in hope of determining whether there is a link between the current problem in Chicago and a few local overdoses, including Saturday's death of 22-year-old Shawn Polewski of Portage.
Taylor hoped the local Great Lakes Lab would be able to make a determination using a couple os empty plastic bags taken from Polewski.
No one was available Tuesday at Great Lakes Lab for comment.
Polewski's death came a week after 19-year-old Meaghan Greene was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose at her home in Westchester Township.
A 26-year-old Portage Township man was also treated for a suspected heroin overdose Jan. 23 and an overdose is suspected in the Jan. 22 discovery of a deceased man at the Travel America Travel Center along U.S. 20 in Porter.
There has been no noticeable increase in the number of heroin overdoses in Lake County, according to Chief Deputy Coroner Jeff Wells.
The county has seen is an increase over the last few years in the number of problems linked to prescription drugs.
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