For the first time in Quebec, police have raided an illegal drug lab that was producing fentanyl capsules.
The lab was raided in the Eastern Townships municipality of Potton last Friday, where police found two tablet presses, an encapsulating machine and a kilogram of what tests later showed to be a mix of Xanax and fentanyl.
Though fentanyl — a synthetic opioid commonly referred to as being 40 times stronger than heroin — has been seized before in Quebec, the raids were the first time police have dismantled a lab found to be packaging the drug. The drug is usually imported in powdered form, then mixed in Canada and pressed into tablet form.
“Fentanyl is becoming more and more known, especially in Western Canada, but this is a first for Quebec,” Sûreté du Québec spokesperson Aurélie Guindon said on Wednesday.
Last week’s raids, conducted by the SQ and Boucherville police after a joint investigation was launched in November, also targeted illegal labs producing synthetic drugs in Longueuil, Boucherville and St-Roch-de-Richelieu.
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In total, police seized more than 400 kilograms of raw substances used to make synthetic drugs, 13 signal jammers, a stun gun, $500 in cash and a money-counting machine.
“These drugs were produced by amateurs who were improvising, in unsanitary conditions, with chemicals that are explosive and harmful to people’s health and the environment,” police said in a statement.
Growing concerns over the spate of overdoses related to opioids, such as fentanyl, sparked a national summit among public health experts in Ottawa in November. The drug’s popularity spread quickly in British Columbia in recent years, forcing the province to declare a provincial crisis.
Earlier this month, the Order of Quebec Pharmacists and the Collège des médecins du Québec called for real-time surveillance of opiate prescriptions to prevent drug abuses and fatal overdoses.
According to statistics from the Quebec coroner’s office, the number of opioid overdose deaths more than doubled in the past 10 years, from 62 in 2005 to 146 in 2014.
