Alex Trelinski
A MALAGA man died from a suspected fentanyl overdose, after returning home from a trip to an undisclosed European country.
The man- in his mid-20’s- was at his parents’ house and began to feel ill including being agitated and aggressive.
His family called for an ambulance which took him to the city’s Regional Hospital with the initial diagnosis being acute intoxication brought on by drug consumption.
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The man went into a coma and he died a few hours later.
A Malaga court is now investigating the cause of his death after tests showed he took a high amount of alcohol and narcotics.
It’s believed he took cocaine and fentanyl- which is harder to detect than ‘traditional’ drugs.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency has warned that the opiate is being used as a cutting substance for cocaine to make it more addictive and enhance its consumption.
Experts say that identifying fentanyl in certain circumstances is harder, especially if a deceased person has been in hospital and has received medicines which can camouflage the presence of the drug during autopsy tests.
The second problem for medics in Spain is that fentanyl does not appear alone, but in association with other substances, so ‘it is very difficult to know what weight it really has in the cause of death’, according to a specialist.
The opiate would be introduced among drug addicts, who mix it, consciously or unconsciously in the cutting of cocaine or other narcotics they take on a regular basis.
The first confirmed death from fentanyl has not yet been reported in Spain, which shows that its consumption in the country appears to still be minimal and associated only with medical treatments.
One of these cases under investigation dates back to March, when the body of a 58-year-old woman was found in a Valladolid park, and she had been prescribed a fentanyl patch to counteract pain she was suffering from.
In the United States, there’s a very different picture where it is estimated that fentanyl amongst drug users causes over 60,000 deaths each year
Fentanyl was originally created to treat severe pain and its effects are 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.
