Hour after hour, people kept dropping. Sirens
blared. There were so many overdoses — people passed out, vomiting,
convulsing — that emergency workers could hardly sprint fast enough to
keep up.
“Even while we were trying to return
people to service, they were passing victims on the ground,” Fire Chief
John Alston told reporters.
Over the course of
24 hours in New Haven, Conn., Wednesday, more than 70 people overdosed
on what authorities believe to be synthetic marijuana, also known as K2
or spice. Dozens of those overdoses took place on the New Haven Green, a
historic downtown park bordering the Yale University campus.
Most
were treated at local hospitals, but at least five refused to be
transported. By late Wednesday night there had been no deaths reported.
In some cases, patients who were hospitalized later returned to the
Green and had to be treated a second time, New Haven Police Officer
David Hartman told WTIC. One person had to be transported three times over the course of the day, he said.
“They
were having to transport faster than they might normally just to turn
the cars around and get them back out,” Sandy Bogucki, New Haven’s
director of emergency medical services, said in a news conference.
Police
and fire officials said the K2 was potentially laced with some type of
opioid. Kathryn Hawk, an emergency department physician at Yale New
Haven Hospital, told the New Haven Register
that the Drug Enforcement Administration confirmed the drugs contained
K2 mixed with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that’s roughly 50 times as
potent as heroin.
Some patients treated at the
Green did not initially respond to naloxone, and needed a higher
concentration of the overdose reversal drug once they arrived at
hospitals, Bogucki said.
Police said they
arrested a person of interest in connection with the mass overdose. New
Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell identified him only as a man who is
known to police for drug violations and was found in possession of a
drug believed to be K2. City officials cautioned in a news release
that the arrested person is not yet confirmed as “the perpetrator
sought in these cases,” but had a warrant against him for violating
probation.
Federal officials last month issued a warning
about the spread of synthetic marijuana across the country. In recent
months, K2 has caused hundreds of people in about 10 states to be
hospitalized, sometimes with severe bleeding.
Several people have died because of complications. The danger lies in
the drug’s unpredictability and its tendency to be cut with potent
opioids or in some cases an anticoagulant used in rat poison.
“The
message has to be very clear to people that any time you are taking a
synthetic drug, you have really no idea, as we’ve seen today, what
you’re taking and how that drug is going to affect you,” Hartman told
WTNH late Wednesday night.
Most of the people who overdosed Wednesday in New Haven were lower-income or homeless, Hartman told WTNH. The demographics led officials to say they believed “somebody was giving these drugs out.”
The
mass overdose began Tuesday night and forced police to continue
monitoring the Green late into Wednesday night. Local officials said it
was unlike anything they had seen before. “This is the highest number of
victims in the shortest amount of time,” New Haven Fire Chief John
Alston told News 12.
As
reports of overdoses began mounting, multiple fire department units
responded. “And after about the sixth one,” Alston said. “We knew we
were going to have a multi-casualty incident.”
When the number was at 30 overdoses, the police chief told WVIT
to warn residents: “Do not come down to the Green and purchase this K2.
It is taking people out very quickly, people having respiratory
failure.”
At one point Wednesday, shouts interrupted a news conference with the fire chief to alert authorities to another overdose.
“We’re
getting another call,” Alston told reporters, some of whom began
chasing after medical workers as they rushed to treat the affected
person.
“Another person down on the green,” Amy Hudak, a reporter for WTNH tweeted from the scene. Twenty minutes later, she tweeted again.
“Another person down.” Two minutes later: “And another . . . this is unbelievable.”
One crew of emergency responders treated nine people within one hour, Alston told reporters. “We’re pretty beat up.”
Lt. Ernest Jones, an EMT for the New Haven Fire Department, described the day to the New Haven Register as a “domino effect.”
“This
was a particularly odd, rare occasion where (there was) call after call
for man down, obviously with symptoms of some kind of overdose, and at
the time of getting that patient packaged and transported to the
hospital, we’d see another immediately fall down, right there,” Jones
said. “At that point, we’d go help that patient, and while helping that
patient, another person went down.”
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) tweeted
that the emergency in New Haven was “deeply troubling and illustrative
of the very real and serious threat that illicit street drugs pose to
health of individuals.
“The substance behind
these overdoses is highly dangerous and must be avoided,” Malloy said,
adding that state public health officials had delivered 50 doses of
Naloxone to New Haven to replenish the supply expended by first
responders over the course of the 24-hour crisis.
Synthetic
cannabinoids can be smoked or vaporized in e-cigarettes, and range in
price from mildly inexpensive to cheap. Some individual cigarettes can
be purchased for as little as $2. The drugs typically can cause rapid
heart rate, vomiting and an increase in blood pressure.
In a warning
last month signed by top federal officials, the Food and Drug
Administration said synthetic marijuana has become particularly risky
because some producers have been adding brodifacoum — a long-acting
anticoagulant thought to extend the drug-induced “high.”
“Today,
we’re joining together to send a strong warning to anyone who may use
synthetic marijuana products that these products can be especially
dangerous as a result of the seemingly deliberate use of brodifacoum in
these illegal products,” the officials said.
A
similar, but smaller overdose incident, played out on the Green on July
4, when more than a dozen people became sick from synthetic marijuana,
according to the Associated Press.
“It is upsetting,” Campbell, the police chief, told a WVIT
reporter. “It’s sad when you know statistically this is something that
is happening to our entire nation, but when you see it first hand right
where you live and where you work, it’s a terrible thing.”
Late
Wednesday night, the scene at the New Haven Green began to “quiet down”
as people emptied out of the park, Hartman, the officer, said. But he
worried that others may have taken the drug home with them.
“One of our fears is that this isn’t over,” Hartman said.
No comments:
Post a Comment