Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said his agency is prioritizing investigations involving the drug fentanyl amid an increase in overdoses.
Cochran also said it is likely that Adrianna Taylor, a student at Mary G. Montgomery High School, and her 17-year-old boyfriend were “unaware” they were ingesting fentanyl – a synthetic opioid that is more powerful than morphine – last Wednesday before she died.
“We are trying to pursue every lead we get on people selling the pills with fentanyl,” said Cochran, speaking generally about a growing number of incidences in Mobile County. “Some are selling it and not realizing it has fentanyl in it. That’s why it’s related to overdose deaths.”Two men, with active felony warrants, were arrested during a traffic stop in Prichard and booked into the Mobile County Jail on charges of trafficking fentanyl.
Cochran said the trafficking offenses carry a minimum of three years in prison, and the potential for life. Virginia Guy, executive director of the Drug Education Council in Mobile, said fentanyl-laced pills are becoming so prevalent that she’s warning it’s becoming too dangerous for anyone to take any pill offered to them on the street.
“We are now seeing, for the first time and during the last year or two, people who don’t have addiction, who are dying from these drugs,” she said. “Before, you had people who would get addicted and they could not get drugs from legal ways … they would get something, overdose and die.” Nearby states such as Georgia and Arkansas reported similar increases. The U.S. experienced a 9.7% rise in drug overdose death during the same time frame.that 107,622 people died of drug overdoses in 2021 in the U.S., with 66.2% or 71,238 deaths tied to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
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