6 overdose deaths in Scioto County in 3 weeks | WBNS-10TV Columbus, Ohio

The Scioto County Health Department says it is experiencing an unusual number of sudden overdose deaths.

The county says it most likely represents extremely potent opiates.

Until toxicology reports are complete, the county is not certain if this is heroin, fentanyl, a mixture of the two or something else.

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The health department warns drug users that the product they are using may be disguised as heroin. Symptoms include rapid respiratory depression.

In the last three years, the Portsmouth Health Department has issued 8 Lethal narcotics alerts. They are designed to warn the public about bad batches of heroin. But the most recent release is different because the department is not sure what’s killing people now.

“Typically in Scioto County, we may see two or three deaths at most and we have between 4 and 6 deaths over the past three weeks so that’s unusual, ” says Lisa Roberts Public Health Nurse for Portsmouth Health Department.

She says something else is strange with this recent spike in drug overdoses.

“There were reports of people in the road in the highway, people a the gas stations being dumped out on the street acting crazy”, she said.

Robert says that’s not typical with heroin users.

“That means something in the drug product that is causing psychosis and that’s unusual. Typically opioid kinds of drugs don’t cause psychosis they tend to be mellow,” she said.

Fire Chief Bill Raison isn’t ready to call this a new wave of opioid deaths.

“We’ve seen it worse we’ve seen it where we’ve had more than a dozen overdoses in a day and we haven’t seen that in a while,” he said.

For the past 6 months, the health department has passed out testing strips to drug users to help them detect if their drugs are laced with fentanyl.

Roberts says until toxicology reports are complete it’s a mystery as to what is causing these latest overdose deaths.

“Law enforcement has stopped field testing drugs because of the exposure to fentanyl we don’t know on a fatality until toxicology comes back and that can take 2 to 3 months,” she says.

Health officials are reminding the community that Narcan should be used in all cases of suspected overdoses.