Fentanyl Drug Ring Busted in Chicago, Detroit

The Midwest has been hit hard by the heroin/fentanyl overdoses. For more on the background see this; in a nutshell, drug dealers have been lacing heroin and cocaine with the dangerously powerful painkiller fentanyl. CNN reports tonight that 47 people, part of the Mickey Cobra's gang, were busted in Chicago in connection with fentanyl trafficking. (More below......)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Shapiro alleged that the Mickey Cobras gang marketed its drugs to take advantage of the deadly heroin's notoriety, selling products with names such as "Max Pain," "Lethal Injection," "Fear Factor," "Drop Dead" and "Final Call." "They carry niche marketing to its extreme," Shapiro said. "They sell branded heroin."

Over 100 kilos of heroin was seized in a raid last Wednesday; more than 400 law enforcement were involved in the raid, which included wiretaps, fake drug buys, and search warrants.

Closer to (my) home, two siblings have been implicated in the distribution of fentanyl in Detroit. This has been a major issue--so far, 79 overdoses attributed to fentanyl in the past MONTH.

In a not-to-surprising discovery by the Detroit Bureau of Substance Abuse, it turns out that "street" fentanyl is manufactured in illegal labs which use a different process than the one which results in the prescription form. The report doesn't go into how the street and prescription forms differ, though, and whether this is the cause of the spike in fatal overdoses.

Illegal fentanyl labs have been around for at least 20 years, but are exceedingly rare because the process requires advanced knowledge of chemistry, said Tom Abercrombie, an Oakland, Calif., crime laboratory supervisor, who has investigated two such labs.