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Las Cruces and Doña Ana County have been put under an alert for high amounts of drug overdoses in the area.
According to a press release from the Las Cruces Police Department, drug intelligence officers working for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) for New Mexico issued the alert after 21 overdoses happened over the course of three weeks in the region. Most of those took place in Las Cruces. Two of those overdoses were fatal.
This high rate of overdoses began with the beginning of August. Early last week, there were seven overdoses in just three days.
Kevin Renn, a drug intelligence officer for New Mexico HIDTA said that this number of overdoses “is very unusual for Doña Ana County” and that these numbers may be higher since the police department does not have data on the number of overdoses from EMS or local hospitals yet.
“At this point, we have not received any drug test results, but fentanyl was the suspected drug in most of these cases,” Runn said.
The LCPD press release said that one possible explanation for the rise in overdoses is carfentanil. Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid that is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl according to LCPD.
The drug was originally designed to sedate large animals like elephants for veterinary purposes.
The two fatal overdoses took place in Las Cruces and took the lives of 30-year-old man and a 26-year-old man. LCPD says that the two overdoses appear to be unrelated to each other.
