Quote:.............Shortly after lunchtime, as drizzle fell outside at the start of a week without work, Paddy Colby told his father that he was going to watch television in his bedroom. He trudged upstairs, closed the door and killed himself.
The cheerful handyman and stepfather did not mean to die. Once in his bedroom, he took out a ‘wrap’ of heroin he had bought – a drug which sells on the streets of Hull for £10. Then he put the powder in citric acid, heated it up and injected it into his body.
After years of addiction, Colby, 39, might have noticed the drug was more soluble than usual and the liquid had a strange reddish hue.
But it hit him so fast that when his stepmother found his body three hours later, the syringe was still in his hand.
For the ‘wrap’ he bought was not just heroin. It had been mixed with two lethal man-made opioids – fentanyl, a painkiller 100 times more potent than morphine; and carfentanyl, an elephant tranquilliser 10,000 times stronger than street heroin.
These are the synthetic drugs carving such a deadly course across the United States, an epidemic that left 64,000 people dead last year, including rock star Prince. This year’s death toll may double.
Now the drugs have arrived in Britain – and a spate of sudden deaths in Hull, the worst incident in the UK so far, shows their devastating impact. Just a few grains of carfentanyl – 0.00002g – can be fatal.
Colby was one of at least 15 people – and possibly more than 20 – killed in Hull and the surrounding area in just a few weeks.
Their lives ended after heroin was mixed with the synthetic opioids, which are made in laboratories abroad, bought on the internet and sold at vast profit. In another case, six people were killed on one side of a street in Stockton, Teesside, earlier this year.
These lethal drugs have begun cropping up across the country – first found in Blyth, Northumberland, then suspected in deaths and drug busts from Leeds to London, St Albans to Southampton, Wakefield to Winchester, and Wales to Northern Ireland.
This feels eerily familiar to me after reporting two months ago from the front line of the US drug crisis in Ohio – not least since there are signs Britain is seeing the same overuse of prescription opioids.
As the Hull inquests unfold, exposing sad stories of lives wrecked by addiction, events in this proud fishing community should serve as a wake-up call to complacent authorities.
‘These new drugs are the very dangerous tip of an iceberg,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Paul Kirby, of Humberside Police, who admitted he knew little about the problem before it hit his patch. ‘The country needs to be alert.’
The first local warning sign came last September in Goole, when a man released from prison died unusually quickly after injecting drugs. Fatal heroin overdoses usually take several hours, death coming from respiratory failure.
Early this year there was talk of super-strength heroin on the streets – then came 31 drug-linked deaths in Hull and East Yorkshire by the end of May. ...........
The US drug epidemic is rooted in the over-prescription of opioid painkillers, drugs which were heavily promoted by pharmaceutical firms and doled out by doctors like sweets.
This led to a big pool of addicted people – many with no history of hard drug use – who shifted to street dealers when prices rose or supplies dried up.
Now hundreds die each week from potent synthetic opioids. The best-known victim was rock star Prince, who died last year aged 57 from a fentanyl overdose...........