MILWAUKEE —There’s a new drug danger in the Milwaukee area, and it’s 50 times more potent than heroin.
It's already killed five people this year alone.
More people are now dying from heroin than from car crashes in Milwaukee County.
The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office said 119 people died of heroin last year. The two statistics share a startling connection.
“The middle of last year, we started to see cases that were presenting with high levels of fentanyl. That started to spark our concern,” said Forensic Technical Director Sara Schreiber of the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Schreiber explained that in its prescription form, fentanyl is a painkiller prescribed in a patch, not a powder, like the illicit version showing up on the streets.
“And it didn't hit us until we'd seen a few cases in a row where we were really suspicious because of the way the scene presented, where it looked like a heroin death to anybody that walked on scene, but the findings that we found in the decedent did not match that description at all,” Schreiber said.
Most of the victims are heroin users, leading investigators to suspect they're unwittingly taking the fentanyl thinking it is heroin or just don't realize how dangerous it is.
“Potency is much greater than that what you'd see with heroin or morphine itself,” Schreiber said. “So it's much more dangerous to use because you don't know the concentration of what you're getting, and therefore you don't know the concentration of what you should use to get the effect.”
One possible reason why fentanyl is showing up more on the streets is because it can be made anywhere, opposed to heroin, which has to be smuggled into the country.
WISN