DEA Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Fentanyl Used To Drive Addiction In W.Va.: Youth Increasingly Targeted

Addiction has taken a very public toll on West Virginia. Recent CDC statistics show a decrease in overdose deaths, but authorities face an uphill challenge in stemming the flow of fentanyl into the state.

From its original intended use as a narcotic for severe pain in cancer patients, the controlled substance fentanyl is being exploited at an alarming rate. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram says mass overdose events – characterized as three or more overdoses within a close range of time at the same location – have increased.

One hundred times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin, just two milligrams of fentanyl can lead to death when used with alcohol, or illicit drugs like heroin or cocaine.

Illicit synthetic opioids and their precursors are produced in countries like China and Mexico before they making their way into the U.S. In lab tests, 42-percent of pills tested in DEA labs contained at least 2 mg of fentanyl.

During his visit to West Virginia in August, White House Director of National Drug Control Policy, Dr. Rahul Gupta, said one American loses their life to drugs every five minutes.

“Not only do we see fentanyl, meth, heroin and cocaine,” Gupta said. “It’s possible now to create any number of concoctions if you have a creative chemist sitting in a lab.”

Fentanyl’s use has become so widespread that the CDC issued an advisory on its Health Alert Network (HAN) warning public health departments, first responders and others about an increase in overdose deaths and the need for bystanders to have access to the lifesaving medication naloxone (Narcan). The medicine reverses an overdose by blocking the effects of opiates on the brain and restoring breathing. Stronger opioids like fentanyl can take more than one dose.

J.T. Scroggs is the Special Agent in Charge of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s Louisville Field Division. In his role, he oversees all of West Virginia. He said narcotics and fake pills are more readily available than ever.

“It’s not a situation we can easily arrest our way out of,” Scroggs said. “We rely heavily on team work with local and state leaders, our partners in law enforcement, we have great relationships with a lot of the police departments around here, Charleston, Huntington, the Sheriffs’ Department.”

Drug traffickers use fentanyl to drive addiction by mixing it with other illicit drugs. Through seizures and drug tracking data, the (The) DEA is seeing fentanyl in street drugs, as well as in the new surge of counterfeit prescription pills. The chemical hits the market under the guise of prescribed medications like adderall, xanax and oxycodone. Scroggs said most overdose victims are unaware they’ve ingested fentanyl until it’s too late.

“The fake pills are coming out to look like and resemble the other ones,” Scroggs said. “So most of the time when people purchase pills even though it’s illegal and it’s illicit they don’t think they’re buying fentanyl, they’re not intentionally buying fentanyl.”

Scroggs said the majority of counterfeit pills resemble 30 mg oxycodone pills (M-30s), but can closely mimic other drugs and prescription medications.

He explained that Mexican cartels are producing meth and fentanyl in record amounts, flooding the U.S. market. Drug trafficking organizations are now targeting kids and teens with rainbow fentanyl – counterfeit pills in a variety of shapes and bright colors.

“They think they’re buying something else,” Scroggs said. “The problem with the pills are, like we said – 2 mg of fentanyl can be fatal. If they survive, the high and the rush is so great that they will go back again.”

For the profit driven trafficker, deaths from overdose are simply the cost of doing business. The money to be made is the driving force behind newer mixes of drugs hitting the market.

“They could care less if you get addicted or you don’t get addicted, or if you survive or you don’t survive, they’re preying on vulnerable people,” Scroggs said.

Fentanyl is cheaper to make than heroin. The high end price for a kilogram of fentanyl a few years ago was around $5,000.

Today Scroggs says a kilogram of fentanyl can be turned into 500 thousand pills with a profit of $1.5 million. In comparison a kilogram of heroin is worth around $65,000.

The drugs typically reach the West Virginia market through smaller independent operations and local distributors.

“West Virginia would be classified as an end user state from the point that typically we’re not supplying to other organizations or areas,” Scroggs said. “A lot of what we see in West Virginia is coming from out of state.”

Metropolitan areas like Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta and Baltimore are considered major drug corridors to the state.

The DEA identifies distributors and traffickers through tips and informants. The organization uses other investigative methods but has recently reassessed its approach as drug cartels become savvier. Investigations at the federal level target the source of the supply to dismantle drug trafficking and money laundering organizations. The agency works with the U.S. Attorney General’s office as well as federal, state and local authorities and prosecutors.

With the advent of social media and increased use of the internet, Scroggs said drug dealers have a captured audience, particularly the younger generation who can readily access illicit drugs on their phones.

The DEA’s ‘One Pill Can Kill’ campaign in partnership with the substance misuse prevention program GameChanger is making a difference.

GameChanger Founder Joseph Boczek said educating kids, teachers, and parents about the risks and deadly consequences of ordering illicit and counterfeit drugs online is key.

“Our youth who are heavy users of social media and the internet have even developed a lingo of how to track where drugs are,” Boczek said. “And the bad guys, the drug dealers, although they’re still on street corners, they’re also in a corporate office building filling orders for illegal drugs.”

With the drug trade now a high tech business Boczek said the kids are taught that only prescribed medication that is dispensed by a registered pharmacist, is safe.

“The bottom line is they are using this to buy Adderall on the internet, which is laced with fentanyl, so they’re playing Russian roulette because they cannot tell when they get this stuff whether it’s fentanyl, or not,” Boczek said.

With DEA efforts to stop fentanyl at the federal, state and local levels, curbing the illicit drug and its precursor chemicals crossing U.S. borders relies on cooperation at all levels.

In August a U.S. congressional report criticized poor cooperation from Chinese authorities to curb increasingly sophisticated forms of fentanyl and its precursors from being shipped to the US.

With tensions between the two countries at a high it remains to be seen if that cooperation will improve.

'Drugs: Costs And Consequences' Traveling Exhibit Opens In Charleston

A traveling exhibit to educate students and the public about the dangers of drugs opened this week at the West Virginia Culture Center.

The arrival of the DEA Museum’s traveling exhibit Drugs: Costs and Consequences in Charleston is through a partnership between the substance use prevention program GameChanger, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the DEA Educational Foundation.

Since it was first introduced to the public at venues across the country, more than 22 million people, namely families and school children, have visited the exhibit. The interactive 5,000 square foot exhibit offers a real life look at drug production and trafficking, money laundering, the science behind addiction and the DEA’s work in West Virginia.

GameChanger founder Joe Bozcek said the DEA-sponsored exhibit will be open through Jan. 15.

“This is real stuff, I mean it is a real drug lab, they show you what the stuff looks like, how it’s made and the things that are done,” he said. “I hope everyone in West Virginia will take advantage of it because it will help save lives.”

Exhibit organizers hope Drugs: Costs and Consequences will serve as a springboard to community conversation by educating future generations on the high cost of drug abuse on families, kids and communities.

Morrisey Says Directive Follows his Suit Against the DEA

West Virginia’s attorney general says his December lawsuit against the federal Drug Enforcement Administration will lead to fewer opioid prescriptions in the U.S.

According to Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a deadline in the lawsuit has led to a directive from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to the DEA to consider potential changes to its regulation establishing how many opioid pills can be manufactured each year.

He says evidence of diversion has been ignored for years in setting those limits, and he moved to suspend his lawsuit Thursday after getting the federal directive.

Morrisey says the new process should require the DEA to formally seek input from the Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as every state.

Ex-DEA Official Blames Congress, but His Own Agency Blessed Opioid Boom

The Washington Post and 60 Minutes released an explosive report detailing how Congress hobbled the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to take down prescription opioid distributors. The exposé stars Joe Rannazzisi, who ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control from 2006 to 2015. Both news organizations celebrated Rannazzisi’s supposedly tough stance on the opioid industry, calling him “courageous” and an “outsider with an attitude.” The 60 Minutes segment was even titled “The Whistleblower.”

It was a hard-hitting story that forced President Donald Trump’s drug czar nominee to withdraw after the revelation that he was a chief advocate of the opioid-friendly bill. (Though not everyone agrees the story was as sinister as Rannazzisi says.) Either way, to my mind, there’s a far more important story to tell about how Rannazzisi and his former office contributed to the massive opioid epidemic that plagues our country. Because, ironically, there is perhaps no entity more responsible for the oversupply of opioids in this country than the DEA.

I discovered this startling information when researching my book, American Pain, about a young Florida felon who hired doctors and made millions selling oxycodone to addicts posing as pain patients. The DEA—tasked with fighting the war on drugs—has for the past two decades approved ever-greater quantities of controlled substances like oxycodone for manufacture and sale in the United States.

One of the DEA’s most important duties is to decide how much of each controlled substance can be manufactured by pharmaceutical companies each year. This process is crucial to public health, yet conducted almost entirely behind closed doors. Drug companies submit annual applications to the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control – the office Rannazzisi led for a decade – requesting to manufacture a certain amount of each controlled substance. The companies and the DEA negotiate over the amount, and then the DEA sets manufacturing quotas. The DEA then publishes only the total amounts requested by the entire industry and the total amounts it has approved. The public remains in the dark about how much any individual company can produce. Or why this amount is needed in the midst of the deadliest drug epidemic in history. Or what the company will do to ensure it doesn’t end up on the street.

The numbers are staggering. In 1993, the DEA limited oxycodone manufacturing to 3,520 kilograms. By 2015 – the end of Rannazzisi’s tenure at the Office of Diversion Control – the production number had skyrocketed to 137,500 kilograms. That’s a 39-fold increase in 22 years. And this was as overdose numbers soared and pill mills flourished. During Rannazzisi’s long tenure, the DEA could have choked off the supply of painkillers flooding American streets. That would have been “tough on Big Pharma.” Instead, the agency let the manufacturers crank out more and more pills.

Cutting back quotas wouldn’t have been a radical step. In the past, the DEA has fought drug waves by cutting supply. Speed pills were popular in the 1970s, so the DEA cut amphetamine quotas by a whopping 90 percent, and the illicit market died. In the 1980s, sedative-hypnotics such as Quaaludes became the new drug craze, and the DEA cut the methaqualone quotas by 74 percent, effectively erasing the problem.

One of Rannazzisi’s predecessors at the head of the Office of Diversion Control, the late Gene Haislip, was in charge during the Quaalude crackdown. He said it wasn’t easy to defy the pharmaceutical industry. But he told a reporter shortly before his death: “You’ve got to have some kind of principles.”

Now we’re in the midst of an epidemic that dwarfs those drug waves. Yet the DEA has chosen to focus primarily on targeting distributors and pharmacies instead of reducing the oversupply of drugs to them.

Nothing illustrates that oversupply better than the Office of Diversion Control’s National Drug Take Back Day. This year, the office reported, 450 tons – tons – of unused prescription drugs were submitted to thousands of collection sites across the country. Presumably not all were controlled substances, but the size of that haul is not something the Office of Diversion Control should be proud of, since it’s responsible for perennially overestimating the drug supply needed for the country’s medical purposes.

The sliver of good news is that for 2017 – two years after Rannazzisi’s ouster – the DEA finally reduced production quotas for several addictive narcotics, including oxycodone, hydromorphone, codeine and fentanyl. But even with these revised quotas in place, pharmaceutical companies are still permitted to produce more than 108,000 kilograms of oxycodone this year. The country survived on just 3,520 kilograms in 1993. Are we really in that much more pain today, or has the DEA allowed Big Pharma to create a generation of addicts?

The DEA should use its quota power to force drug companies to make sure their addictive wares aren’t heading to the street. Companies facing a massive cut in supply could no doubt be coerced to take strong measures to ensure that the drugs end up in the right hands… or else lose even more supply.

After all, what’s more important to the public’s health — the DEA’s ability to go after drug distributors who may be oversupplying, or its responsibility to stop that oversupply in the first place?

John Temple (@johntemplebooks) is the author of “American Pain,” a nonfiction book that chronicles how two young felons built a colossal pain clinic that sold drugs to addicts. The book was nominated for an Edgar Award and won the INDIEFAB Book of the Year award in True Crime. Previous books include “The Last Lawyer,” which won the Scribes Book Award in 2010, and “Deadhouse.” More information about Temple’s books can be found at www.johntemplebooks.com. Temple teaches journalism at West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media and lives in Morgantown, W.Va., with his wife and two sons. Prior to teaching at WVU, he was a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh and Tampa.