Twenty-five ampoules of Fentanyl – a powerful, synthetic opioid, up to 100 times stronger than morphine – disappeared from the pharmacy of the Pitesti County Emergency Hospital.
Fentanyl is an extremely dangerous substancePhoto: Sherry Young | Dreamstime.com
20 employees have access to the pharmacy of the County Hospital in Pitesti, and the Fentanyl is under lock and key and is released only on the order of the head of the Intensive Care Anesthesia section or the Emergency Department, according to against the news. Then, the opioid used as an anesthetic is signed for by the persons designated by them.
During such an operation, the lack of Fentanyl was discovered in June. Five empty boxes were found, which should have contained a total of 25 vials. There were no surveillance cameras in the pharmacy at the time, they were installed later.
“The seal was still present on the box, it was just cut with a cutter, if I could say, or something like that, the grid in which the ampoule sits was present, only the five vials were missing, that in a box there are five vials in a grid “, said Bianca Ramona Ciucă, chief pharmacist at the Pitesti County Hospital, according to stirilorprotv.ro.
What is Fentanyl?
Fentanyl is a substance under national control, which can be used for medical purposes only with a doctor’s prescription.
It is a powerful, synthetic opioid, 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. It is mainly used to treat patients with severe pain and can be used with other drugs as an anesthetic.
In the United States, its consumption is wreaking havoc. The drug is one of the leading causes of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 49, according to the Washington Post. A very small dose is enough to kill an adult.
Last year, more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, and two-thirds of those deaths were attributed to Fentanyl.
Federal agents in the United States announced that in 2022 they had seized enough Fentanyl to kill every American, when only two milligrams are needed for a fatal dose. The drug is so powerful that a lethal dose is small enough to fit on the tip of a pencil.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says it seized 379 million doses of the potentially deadly Fentanyl in 2022, enough to kill all 330 million US residents.
The agency says most fentanyl is trafficked into the US from Mexico, where the substance is made in secret factories run by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, which are also responsible for Mexico’s gruesome crime spree. Traffickers use chemicals from China to produce the drugs.
A report published in June by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on the global drug situation shows that the number of people using drugs increased by 23% in the decade 2011-2021, reaching 296 million in 2021 compared to 240 million in the beginning of the decade.
Is the use of Fentanyl starting to spread in Romania as well?
Contacted by HotNews.ro, the head of the National Anti-Drug Agency (ANA), Ramona Dabija, says that since the beginning of this year, the ANA has been monitoring this phenomenon related to the substance fentanyl, being a group of experts from the medical units in Bucharest, “in order to cases of Fentanyl consumption be identified as quickly as possible”.
“In the year 2022 and in the first semester of 2023, no cases of medical emergencies were identified in which the consumption of Fentanyl was mentioned, but 7 cases of admission to treatment were identified, in which positive results for Fentanyl came out. Unfortunately, it is also used for recreational purposes, often mixed with other drugs to increase potency,” Dabija told HotNews.ro. (PHOTO: Dreamstime.com)
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