By Suzanne Elliott
SElliott@DominionPost.com
MORGANTOWN —Fentanyl-related deaths in West Virginia in 2015 and 2017 were 122 percent of what they were between 2005 and 2014, according to a recent study
by West Virginia University researchers.
The state leads the country in fentanyl-related deaths and also has the highest per capita rate of overdose deaths as well, the researchers said.
The study — funded by the National Institutes of Health — comes as deaths in West Virginia from prescription opioids have declined. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
WVU researchers found that fentanyl deaths began increasing in 2015 because of a rise of illegal fentanyl imported from China.
“Up until then people who were shifting from legal prescription drugs to illegal drugs were shifting to heroin and opioids coming in from Mexico and other places,” study co-author Gordon Smith, an epidemiologist in WVU’s School of Public Health, said in a release.
People may end up taking the drug, or a fentanyl analog, under the guise that it is prescription opioids, said Smith, who worked on the study with Marie Abate, the director of WVU’s School of Pharmacy’s West Virginia Center for Drug and Health Information, and Zheng Dai, a graduate student.
“It’s very easy to export,” Smith said “Instead of having to smuggle truckloads of heroin in, someone can send small packages through the mail.”
The good news is state medical examiners have been able to identify the cause of every drug death in the state. Those cases were logged in a statewide forensic drug database at WVU’s Health Sciences Center, established in 2005 in collaboration with the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The database tracks the cause of death, toxicology testing results, recent prescriptions for controlled substances and the individual’s current medical condition.
That catalog is used by healthcare providers and law enforcement to better understand drug trends.
“The extent of the decedent information found in this database is unique nationwide,” Abate said.
To combat the rise in fentanyl deaths, however, Smith said there needs to be more of a widespread distribution of naloxone — also known as narcan — to reverse the effects of an overdose.
“But with fentanyl, you could halve the number of addicts in West Virginia and the overdose rate would still go up because the strength of the drug coming in is so much stronger and can vary widely from one day to the next,” Smith said.
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