A young couple drove from Seneca County last week to buy some supercharged heroin that was making the rounds in Buffalo.
Soon after smoking it, the 21-year-old Waterloo woman lost consciousness. Her 26-year-old boyfriend managed to call 911. It took three doses of Narcan, an opiate antidote, before Amherst Police Officer Sean D. Shaver revived the woman.
She was lucky. These days, heroin being widely sold in the Buffalo area is really fentanyl or heroin heavily laced with the laboratory-produced opioid that is 30 to 50 times stronger than ordinary heroin.
Nearly two dozen other addicts were not so fortunate over the last two weeks. Twenty-three people have died as a result of opiate overdoses in Erie County during an 11-day period that started Jan. 29. Twelve of the deaths occurred in Buffalo, and the others were in the county?s suburbs and rural areas. The ages of the deceased range from 20 to 61.
Alarmed at the deadly spike, County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz along with County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale R. Burstein and federal authorities Tuesday issued an ?emergency warning,? urging drug addicts to discard any packet of heroin they recently purchased but have not used.
The reason?
It could kill them.
?White China? heroin
This particular brand of street heroin, sometimes referred to as ?White China? heroin, contains fentanyl that Chinese laboratories are manufacturing and sending to Mexican drug cartels, which repackage and ship it to the United States.
?The vast majority of the deaths, 19 of the 23, are believed to be related to heroin laced with an extremely fatal batch of fentanyl,? Poloncarz said. ?If you have a packet of this drug you recently purchased, it is basically a death sentence. This epidemic knows no boundaries. It affects people from Buffalo to the affluent suburbs and to rural communities.?
At Tuesday?s news conference in the emergency room at Erie County Medical Center, where drug addicts who overdose often end up, U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr. said addicts refusing to heed the warning ?are making a suicide pact that could very well lead to your death.?
Burstein said she was not surprised that it took three doses of naloxone, the generic name for Narcan, to revive the woman last week in Williamsville.