![]() ![]() "We knew we were going to have multi-casualty incident." "And after about the sixth one," Alston said. "This is the highest number of victims in the shortest amount of time," New Haven Fire Chief John Alston told News 12.Īs reports of overdoses began mounting, multiple fire department units responded. Local officials said it was unlike anything they had seen before. The mass overdose began Tuesday night and forced police to continue monitoring the Green late into Wednesday night. ![]() The demographics led officials to believe "somebody was giving these drugs out." Most of the people who overdosed Wednesday in New Haven were lower-income or homeless, Hartman told WTNH. "The message has to be very clear to people that any time you are taking a synthetic drug, you have really no idea, as we've seen today, what you're taking and how that drug is going to affect you," Hartman told WTNH late Wednesday night. The danger lies in the drug's unpredictability and its tendency to be cut with potent opioids or in some cases an anticoagulant used in rat poison. ![]() Several people have died because of complications. In recent months, K2 has caused hundreds of people in about 10 states to be hospitalized, sometimes with severe bleeding. City officials cautioned in a news release that the arrested person is not yet confirmed as "the perpetrator sought in these cases," but had a warrant against him for violating probation.įederal officials last month issued a warning about the spread of synthetic marijuana across the country. Police Chief Anthony Campbell identified him only as a man who is known to police for drug violations and was found in possession of a drug believed to be K2. Police said they arrested a person of interest in connection with the mass overdose. Some patients treated at the Green did not initially respond to Naloxone, and needed a higher concentration of the overdose reversal drug once they arrived at hospitals, Bogucki said. Kathryn Hawk, an Emergency Department physician at Yale New Haven Hospital, told the New Haven Register that the Drug Enforcement Administration confirmed the drugs contained K2 mixed with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that's roughly 50 times more potent than heroin. Police and fire officials said the K2 was potentially laced with some type of opioid. "They were having to transport faster than they might normally just to turn the cars around and get them back out," Sandy Bogucki, New Haven's Director of Emergency Medical Services, said in a news conference. ![]() One person had to be transported three times over the course of the day, he said. In some cases, patients who were hospitalized later returned to the Green and had to be treated a second time, New Haven Police Officer David Hartman told WTIC. By late Wednesday night there had been no deaths reported. Most were treated at local hospitals, though at least five refused to be transported. Dozens of those overdoses took place on the New Haven Green, a historic downtown park bordering the Yale University campus. Over the course of 24 hours in New Haven, Connecticut, Wednesday, more than 70 people overdosed on what authorities believe to be synthetic marijuana, also known as K2 or spice. "Even while we were trying to return people to service, they were passing victims on the ground," Fire Chief John Alston told reporters. There were so many overdoses - people passed out, vomiting, convulsing - that emergency workers could hardly sprint fast enough to keep up. ![]()
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