ST. LOUIS — Federal prosecutors have charged Chuny Ann Reed with distributing crack cocaine and fentanyl after six men and one woman died of suspected overdoses.
Many of them lived at the Parkview Apartments in the Central West End.
Two other men overdosed but survived.
The Drug Enforcement Administration started seeing Fentanyl pop up in the United States in 2015, now agents say it's become one of the biggest drug threats.
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Colin Dickey showed how deadly just two grams of fentanyl can be
"If I pour this out, that is potentially 1,000 lethal or fatal doses of fentanyl," Dickey said.
Dickey equates the amount of Fentanyl it takes to be deadly to a sugar packet.
"Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin, and it's 100 times stronger than morphine,' Dickey said.
Dickey said the drug is man-made from chemicals sourced from China that are sent to illicit labs in Mexico and then distributed into the United States.
"The most dangerous thing about fentanyl is the fact that it only takes 2 milligrams to be a lethal dose and the other thing that makes it extremely dangerous is that it can be mass-produced in large quantities," Dickey said.
Raw fentanyl is in powder form. It's being put into fake pills to mirror prescription pills.
Dickey sourced the Centers for Disease Control's research on the 100,000 drug-related overdose deaths in the U.S. last year.
"Of those 100,000 drug-related overdose deaths, 64,000 can be attributed to fentanyl," Dickey said.
Last year, the St. Louis division seized 188 kilograms. That's nearly the same amount they seized the two years prior to that combined. Dickey demonstrates how they seize the drugs with fake packages.
"We would take the package and we would put it in the fume hood and we would have on our protective equipment and our agents, and task force officers and DEA personnel would weigh the substances and potentially do a field test," Dickey said.
The cost of Fentanyl per kilogram has dropped over the last few years, because of its ability to be mass-produced, Dickey said. That has made it more readily available, in turn becoming more and more accessible.
"Our investigations on some occasions, the individuals that are using these substances do not know that fentanyl is actually included in the substances that they are putting in their body," Dickey said.
Dickey said that Fentanyl is also often found mixed in Cocaine, Heroin and Methamphetamine.
If they suspect there's Fentanyl in the drugs they've seized, they won't do a field test. They'll send it to get tested in their Chicago lab just to make sure their officers aren't exposed.