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'Pink' Drug Said to Be More Potent Than Heroin

'Pink' Drug Said to Be More Potent Than Heroin

A new designer drug known as "Pink" is said to be more potent than heroin. (Nolte Lourens/Dreamstime.com)

By    |   Thursday, 20 October 2016 05:59 AM EDT

The ‘Pink’ drug is said to be more potent than heroin, with one Utah police chief claiming that the designer drug, Pink AKA U-47700, is strong enough to put you in cardiac arrest if you touch it.

Pink is currently available legally in most U.S. states, according to The Fix. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has described the drug as having “effects very similar to morphine and heroin, but with a significantly shorter duration of action.”

“This stuff is so powerful that if you touch it, you could go into cardiac arrest,” Park City, Utah, Police Chief Wade Carpenter told NBC News. “The problem is if you have a credit card and a cell phone, you have access to it.”

According to NBC, two 13-year-old boys died in September after overdosing on what sources believe might have been the Pink drug. The drug had been mailed to their homes through the U.S. mail.

One of the boys who died was Ryan Ainsworth, who was reportedly found dead on his couch just two days after his friend, Grant Seaver, also died.

“I wish I had been better warned,” one of Grant's friends, Zeus Garcia, sang at a memorial service, according to the Deseret News. “But now it’s too late.”

Melissa Davidson, a mother of a Park City teen, showed NBC News just how easy it is for someone to buy the drug online.

“Look! There are like pages and pages that you can buy this stuff online,” she said.

According to The Fix, Pink is part of a family of synthetic opioids including “carfentanil, ifentanyl, and furanyl fentanyl.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the number of deaths from opioid overdoses has increased drastically, rising from 730 in 1999 to 5,544 by 2014.

Pink is illegal in four states and can be purchased online for just $5, available as a pill, powder or mist, The Fix noted.

“The hardest part is when something new comes up, and no one in the country or world has seen it in a forensic setting yet and trying to decide what that actual structure or drug is,” Bryan Holden, senior forensic scientist with the Utah Department of Public Safety, said, according to NBC. “Sometimes we have had cases where the substance sat for months and months – no one had ever seen it before, and until someone else sees it or manufactures it then we kind of know what it is.”

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TheWire
The 'Pink' drug is said to be more potent than heroin, with one Utah police chief claiming that the designer drug, Pink AKA U-47700, is strong enough to put you in cardiac arrest if you touch it.
pink, drug, potent, heroin
414
2016-59-20
Thursday, 20 October 2016 05:59 AM
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