[Vegas Sun] Tiny specks of this powerful synthetic opioid can prove fatal even when ingested unknowingly: Fentanyl killed 219 people in the Las Vegas Valley in 2020, about a 200% increase from the previous year.
Recently, while the country was ravaged by the opioid crisis, Clark County saw a drop in annual deaths blamed on all opioids from 2015 to 2018, the year with the lowest figure in at least a decade.
Since then, those numbers have soared.
"We said fentanyl was coming," Metro Police Capt. John Pelletier told reporters Thursday. "Fentanyl is here."
Asked how this year was going, he answered succinctly: "not good."
Fentanyl deaths are on par with the "alarming" 30% increase in total overdose deaths in 2020, when 768 people succumbed to them, compared with 591 in 2019, Pelletier said, noting that fentanyl killed 31 people in August, an average of one a day.
Metro on Thursday announced the creation of the Overdose Response Team, a task force that comprises agencies such as local police departments, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and local and federal prosecutors that "if possible," authorities would pursue murder cases for dealers accused of killing their clients with drugs. He didn’t expound on how the task force would operate. |