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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

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How it got here
Authorities believe illicit fentanyl moved from an illegal lab in Mexico through Chicago, to Detroit and points beyond. Click here to see its path.


Story chapters

INDEX
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1: The teenager
CHAPTER 2: The chemist
CHAPTER 3: The drug
CHAPTER 4: The hooker
CHAPTER 5: The sigh
CHAPTER 6: The prison
CHAPTER 7: The scientist
CHAPTER 8: The morgue
CHAPTER 9: The trail
CHAPTER 10: The dead
CHAPTER 11: The lab
CHAPTER 12: The lie
CHAPTER 13: The truth
CHAPTER 14: The reckoning
CHAPTER 15: The requiem
EPILOGUE
A father's story

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Chapter 9: The trail
Fentanyl hits the East Coast hard.

June 24, 2007

BY JIM SCHAEFER and JOE SWICKARD

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

Death moved east.

By April 2006, emergency workers in Philadelphia, Camden, N.J., and Delaware were swamped with overdoses. Heroin laced with fentanyl and sold as Al Capone, Flatline, Rest in Peace, Rolex and Exorcist was dropping addicts everywhere.

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As in Chicago, Philadelphia emergency workers were going through an astonishing amount of Narcan.

""Today, when we give people Narcan, they're not coming out of it,"" Philadelphia Fire Capt. Richard Bossert said.

""We had no idea what we were getting into.""

Across the river, New Jersey was also counting dead bodies and, as in Philadelphia, addicts died with needles in their arms, unused dope still in the syringe. Emergency responders were handling 60 overdoses a day, compared with the usual 10 cases.

Minutes after New Jersey health officials posted the jump in overdose deaths in an Internet alert, an official from Maryland called: People were dying there, too.

<< Chapter 8: The morgueChapter 10: The dead >>

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