A few more reports with some more details on drug:
http://www.kvue.com/news/state/stori....2baf341b.html
By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News
John Schreiber/The Daily Campus
The drug can be lethal if taken outside a prescription.
A rare but expensive drug sometimes absorbed through lollipops contributed to the death of a 20-year-old Southern Methodist University student in early December.
The Dallas County medical examiner has determined that Jacob Stiles overdosed on a toxic mixture of cocaine, alcohol and the synthetic opiate fentanyl.
The drug is used as a painkiller, but in any form fentanyl can be lethal if taken outside a prescription.
“People have died with needles in their arms,” said Kurt Kleinschmidt, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center and toxicologist with the North Texas Poison Center.
“What’s really nasty about fentanyl (is) it’s a more potent narcotic than heroin or morphine - up to 100 times," Dr. Kleinschmidt said. "People can have overdoses and not know what they’ve gotten themselves into."
One expert said that nationally, more abusers prefer fentanyl patches over the lollipops. Some people apply more than one patch, while more hardcore users get a syringe and extract the drug right out of the patch.
Local, state and federal officials say that abuse of fentanyl is on the rise, but the facts it is expensive and hard to get have kept it from spreading more quickly.
Abuse is relatively rare, mostly because of the high cost. But about a month ago, a health insurance company alerted Dallas police to some suspiciously large prescription orders billed to their company for Actiq, which is fentanyl in a berry-flavored lozenge attached to a stick.
This form of the powerful synthetic opiate is designed to help manage pain of cancer patients who have trouble swallowing. But to abusers, the products are known as “perc-o-pops” or “lollipops,” and because of their potency they can plunge users into a stupor. Mix it with other drugs and the combination can be lethal, experts say.
Dallas police in the past few weeks arrested two workers at a doctor’s office for forging prescriptions for $40,000 of the lollipop form of fentanyl, known under the brand name Actiq.
http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedconten....2b395050.html
No matter just what happened, how it happened, or why it happened, Brother Stiles death is way too early in his life.
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