Hospitals and outreach workers are struggling against a surge of fatal heroin overdoses in Chicago, as word has spread that more potent, though deadly, drugs have hit the street.
Police were linking 14 deaths on Monday and Tuesday to heroin overdoses, an alarming toll that shows the drug’s broad reach into society.
A 17-year-old son of a Franklin Park police official died in the back seat of his car Tuesday, still clutching the small packet of heroin he had just bought on the West Side, police said. That same day, a 39-year-old mother from Lombard collapsed after shooting up the drug and later died in a West Side hospital. A day laborer and a union worker from Chicago also were among the dead.
Police are trying to determine whether these deaths should be added to a list of 60 people who have died this year in Cook County from a deadly combination of heroin and the powerful painkiller fentanyl. The most recent rash of deaths, centered on the West Side, may be one of the largest clusters of fentanyl-related deaths since investigators have been tracking the problem.
Officials say the synthetic narcotic, used legally for pain management, is being added to heroin to give users a more powerful high.
“Most people have heard the stories. They just think it’s good heroin. They think the media and the police and the doctors and nurses just don’t want them to have it,” said Chuck Thomas, chairman of emergency medicine at Norwegian-American Hospital on the West Side.
Over the last several months, Thomas said there has been a spike in overdose victims in the hospital’s emergency room. The hospital typically had one or two overdose victims a day, but in the past few months, “we’re seeing 10, 15, 20 a day.”
Thomas said executives recently gave the hospital approval to order the narcotic Revex, a much more powerful antidote to what typically is used in heroin overdoses.
As hospitals scramble to save lives, outreach workers are warning drug users to steer clear of the potent fentanyl-laced heroin. But for those who don’t, outreach workers also educate them on what to do in case of heroin overdoses.
Susie Gualtieri, with the Chicago Recovery Alliance, said they show drug users videos with step-by-step instructions and dispense vials of the drug naloxone.
The heroin causes you to “relax to death,” she said. “What [naloxone] does is it blocks your receptors from feeling the heroin.”
Meanwhile, local police are making undercover buys of heroin, to track where fentanyl is being sold, and testing the samples for clues to the drug’s source. Their federal counterparts focus on trafficking–tracing the drug’s routes into Midwestern and East Coast cities, most likely from Mexican labs.
The rise in deaths over the last few days has been alarming for police, and it has meant heartbreak for families across the Chicago area, from Englewood to Park Ridge.
Joseph Krecker, the son of Franklin Park Deputy Chief Jack Krecker, graduated from Maine South High School on Sunday. Two days later, he was found dead on the Northwest Side in the back seat of his car. He was about halfway between his Park Ridge home and the street-corner drug markets of the West Side.
“The stuff must have been so powerful that it killed him instantly,” said Frank Limon, chief of the Chicago Police Department’s organized crime division.
Keith Lee got a phone call about 10 a.m. Tuesday telling him his brother’s body had been found in an alley near Kedzie Avenue and Huron Street. Craig Lee, 45, did odd jobs and worked as a day laborer, his brother said.
“He was always saying he was going to stop. The last time was last year,” Keith Lee said.
The family’s funeral plans for his brother will have to wait for toxicology tests to tell investigators if the drugs that killed him were tainted with fentanyl, he said.
While many addicts are drawn by the lure of fentanyl’s dangerous potency, some addicts who believe they’ve survived brushes with the drug say they are staying away.
Catherine Wrencher is a 36-year-old longtime heroin addict. She said she believes the terrifying episode she had in recent weeks was due to fentanyl.
“I couldn’t breathe, and I started spitting up blood,” she said.
Wrencher called 911 before she passed out and was revived by EMS workers. She said she wants nothing more to do with fentanyl, but short of stopping her drug use, the decision is not within her control, she said.
Phil Thorn, 50, and Jaime Salinas, 28, said they heard about a more potent heroin in January and went with a group of people to buy $10 bags on the South Side. After shooting up in his Cicero apartment, Thorn said the others got sick and passed out.
“It was right away, as soon as they injected, they were dropping, within a minute,” said Thorn, who said he was able to administer naloxone and revive them.
Salinas said he knew the drug was different from anything he had ever tried. “I had tunnel vision, and I felt real lightheaded. On heroin you get high, not lightheaded and no tunnel vision.”
Ever since that night, he said, he goes to the same dealers because he trusts their drugs.
Thorn, a heroin addict for 10 years, said he promised himself he wouldn’t use heroin that he knew was laced with fentanyl. But he said the withdrawal pains that come 12 hours after using heroin may be too strong.
“I’m a dope fiend, and I’ll probably do it, but I’ll be very careful,” he said. “It’s not a matter of getting high anymore, it’s about not being sick.”
‘SHE COULDN’T GIVE IT UP’
Gayle Evans sat on the floor in her Lombard apartment, sifting through her daughter’s black purse, tears streaming down her face. She held up a handful of thin paper: admittance sheets to three different drug rehabilitation programs.
Proof that her daughter, Hazel Brewer, tried to kick her drug habit, she says.
“Westlake, St. Elizabeth’s, Sacred Heart,” Evans read, shaking her head. “She tried so hard. So many times.”
Brewer, a 39-year-old mother of four, got out of a detox program for heroin addiction Monday. At 11 a.m., she picked up a friend and, with the $25 Brewer had with her, they bought drugs, her mother said. By 4 a.m. Tuesday, Brewer knew she needed medical attention.
“She told him she wasn’t feeling good. She said, ‘Oh no, something ain’t right,’ ” Evans said. The friend took her to Sacred Heart Hospital, where she was admitted. At 4:10 p.m., Brewer was pronounced dead of a suspected heroin overdose.
Evans said her daughter had been using heroin and crack, buying them from people she knew near the Austin neighborhood in Chicago.
“She couldn’t give it up,” her mother said Wednesday. “She’s been in a million hospitals trying to kick the habit. But then she just gets in it again.”
Brewer was a headstrong, bright daughter, the older of two children, her mother said. Her brother, John Evans, remembers her as an aggressive sister who poked fun and tussled with him. She loved to roller skate and was a gymnast who once dreamed of opening a gymnastics school.
But her bold attitude turned troublesome in her early teens, her mother said. She would sneak cigarettes from her father’s stash and push family limits, her brother recalled.
When her father, the tough disciplinarian in the home, died when she was 13, Brewer’s life spiraled, her family said.
That same year, she was raped by a friend and tried several times to run away, her mother said. She graduated from Glenbard North High School, had her first child at 18 and got married.
Cigarettes led to marijuana, and marijuana to crack and heroin, her brother said.
Brewer separated from her husband more than a decade ago, when he couldn’t take her drug abuse any longer, her mother said.
In recent years, Brewer spent more time in drug rehabilitation programs than she did on the outside. She would “binge”–take drugs for days at a time–in Chicago, then check in to treatment programs, and then go back to drugs again, her brother said.
“I lost count of how many times,” he said.
Brewer rarely spoke about her addiction, except to promise family members that she was going to get clean, her brother said.
Gayle Evans doesn’t know if her daughter knew about or used drugs laced with fentanyl, a powerful painkiller that authorities believe may be responsible for a rise in heroin overdoses recently. She said her daughter never mentioned it or the drug’s common names to her.
Brewer’s family members have custody of her four children, ages 21 to 4, and were raising them with occasional help from Brewer–when she was sober.
“She wasn’t the perfect lady. She had her ups and her downs,” said her daughter Sahari, 11, on Wednesday. “But I know that she loved us. I know that she did what she could do to be here for us. I know she was a good mother.”
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The facts about fentanyl
Fentanyl is an extraordinarily effective drug when it comes to pain relief. But abuse it, and the chance of deadly complications is high.
A synthetic medication, fentanyl belongs to a class of drugs known as opioids. Others in the class include morphine, heroin, methadone, hydrocodone (Vicodin) and oxycodone (OxyContin).
Opioids work by binding to parts of nerves responsible for perceiving and transmitting pain. These opioid receptors are found primarily in a person’s brain and spinal column.
For people in distress, relief can come in a matter of seconds after a fentanyl injection. For others, a feeling of euphoria is common, said Dr. Allen Burton, an associate professor of pain medicine at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Potency is fentanyl’s hallmark: It is between 80 to 100 times more powerful than morphine.
Underscoring the need for caution, fentanyl has a narrower “therapeutic window”–the difference between a safe dose and a dangerous dose–than other opioids.
“Overshoot the dose by just a little bit, and you can go from euphoric to unconscious or dead pretty easily,” Burton said.
The greatest danger comes from fentanyl’s potential to depress the central nervous system and cause breathing to shut down if it is taken in excess.
Signs of an overdose include “trouble breathing or shallow breathing, extreme sleepiness or sedation, an inability to walk or talk normally, and feeling faint, dizzy and confused,” according to a publication from the Food and Drug Administration.
Fentanyl has two legitimate purposes. In hospitals and other medical settings, anesthesiologists give it intravenously to patients undergoing surgery. The drug also is available in a skin patch or lozenge for people with severe chronic pain, such as cancer patients and patients with degenerative neurological disorders.
— Tribune
