Deadly Dose: TBI agents see increase of fentanyl, fake oxycodone

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) – The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) has agents working on drug crimes in the field and its labs. Like many places across the country, fentanyl takes up a major part of the caseload.

“It wasn’t until it became popular in the illicit front that fentanyl now is everywhere,” Special Agent in Charge Tommy Farmer said. Farmer is with the drug division and manages the Tennessee Dangerous Drugs Task Force.

The Task Force has been in the works for more than 20 years. It’s a collaborative team made up of state, local and federal partners.

“It’s a large comprehensive group that comes together and watches over what those emerging drug trends are and how we need to address them,” Farmer said.

Farmer says there are over 2,000 analogs of fentanyl.

“We started seeing acetyl and acryl and those were stronger,” Farmer said. “A hundred to five hundred times more powerful than morphine. And that’s just simply evolved. Now we’re seeing a whole new group of nidizines and some of these are as strong as 20 times more powerful than morphine. “It’s just a whack a mole. We have to identify it again, figure out the standards, and figure out what it is. And then control it or try to get it moved to a controlled substance.”

Dealers are cutting or lacing fentanyl with other drugs, which poses even more problems.

“The most common that we see right now is we see a combination of fentanyl and xylazine,” Farmer said. “And xylazine is a large animal tranquilizer. It’s a dance by the distributor or the dealer that doesn’t want to alert the person that he has cut their drug making it weaker.”

Farmer says Xylazine mimics the effects of fentanyl but it’s not responsive to Narcan.

“The strongest product that they can get if it’s just straight-up fentanyl will likely kill them,” Farmer said. “It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow but I promise you, it’s going to catch up. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

Fentanyl has become a “buzzword” to an extent when it comes to drug use but there are some misconceptions about it.

“If you touch fentanyl and you have dry hands, is fentanyl going to absorb into your skin just by simply touching a powder? No, it’s not going to,” Farmer said. “Is it a possibility that fentanyl could be on a dollar bill? Absolutely. Is it a possibility that a person touched it and they died? I’d say that the chances are probably slim.”

Farmer also addressed whether or not it could be laced with weed.

“We’ve had it in one cannabis sample, one hemp sample that came in,” Farmer said. “It was confirmed by the crime lab that there was fentanyl in that hemp sample.”

The “dance” by the dealer is a difficult one.

“A person can say ‘Well, okay, I know that I put a gram in that. I put one teaspoon of fentanyl and the rest is inactive or it’s xylazine.’ A person can know that they did that much but dosing it out, whether it’s in a powder or a pill form,” Farmer said. “It’s making sure that they put the exact amount in each person. You would have to be in a clinical setting with a trained professional and the type of instrumentation and the equipment to accurately dose that the way that it needs to be dosed and then there’s still risk. If we didn’t learn anything about the opioid epidemic, even if it’s pharmaceutical grade, even if, there’s still harms.”

As Farmer gets the drugs out in the field, Special Agent Forensic Scientist Michael Bleakley tests them in the lab. He’s a supervisor in the Forensic Chemistry Unit of the Knoxville Crime Laboratory.

“Each sample is about 45 minutes of instrument time. And you have to have two tests for every single thing we identify,” Bleakley said. “The generic run takes about 15 minutes but we also have to run a blank prior to and we also have to run a couple of column flushes beforehand to make sure that the blank is perfectly blank.”

Fake M30s, 30-milligram Oxycodones, are a major problem right now. It’s one of the most tested pills in the lab.

“Basically, we don’t see real M30s anymore. They don’t exist for what we get in the laboratory,” Bleakley said. “They’re almost always stamped well but look modeled. They don’t have the right color blue and the stamping isn’t quite right. It has gotten to the point where we can’t even tell the difference under a microscope ourselves.”

Bleakley runs samples through a Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer- or a GCMS.

“This will take mixtures separate them into their components and then identify every component in that particular substance,” Bleakley said.

It helps determine what drugs make up an evidence sample.

“With all these fentanyl mixtures almost all of them have to have a retention time so we’re running things multiple times,” Bleakley said.

While a lot depends on a person’s tolerance, it really doesn’t take much fentanyl to kill.

“That may be a dose or a lethal dose of heroin and again that’s a relative term depending on the person’s tolerance to fentanyl which would be a pharmaceutical grade,” Bleakley said. “Typically 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, and then all the way down to a strong analog of carfentanyl which is 10,000 or greater all the way down to a fifth of a grain of salt.”

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