A traffic stop on July 7 in Lewis County resulted in a seizure of 24 pounds of methamphetamine, law enforcement reported.
The Lewis County Joint Narcotics Enforcement Team is working with state and federal law enforcement to determine if methamphetamine laced with fentanyl, a popular drug on the East Coast right now, is being distributed locally and along the West Coast.
“They call it ‘monster meth,’ it’s pretty popular right now in the East Coast and it’s when they are finding fentanyl laced into the methamphetamine,” JNET detective Adam Haggerty said.
As of now, JNET is still in the preliminary stages of the work to determine if “monster meth” is in Lewis County, meaning they are testing the methamphetamine they seize and working with the Lewis County Coroner’s Office to see if any of the overdose deaths involving methamphetamine locally have been due to meth laced with fentanyl.
The Coroner’s Officer has reported 14 overdose deaths with 12 of them involving methamphetamine in 2020. A bulk of those deaths occurred in between March 1 and June 22, where there were 11 methamphetamine overdoses.
“My curiosity will always be in there because I want to know why, after all these years, people who were not usually dying from meth overdoses are (dying) now,” Haggerty said.
However, none of the confirmed overdose deaths involving meth have indicated fentanyl was in their blood, according to Coroner Warren McLeod, but six suspected overdose deaths are still pending toxicology reports. Earlier this year, McLeod reported that during the same time last year and the year before his office only saw one meth overdose each.
Toxicology reports typically take 14 to 15 days to be completed, then another 24 to 48 hours to be reviewed by a pathologist before it returns to the Coroner’s Office, McLeod said.
JNET is also testing the meth that they are seizing. Most recently, JNET found 22 pounds of meth under the floorboard of a van driving on Interstate 5 as well as 26,000 fentanyl pills that they seized in a drug deal in separate busts.
According to Haggerty, JNET is working to get those drugs tested at a lab, either the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab or a federal lab in San Francisco.
But Haggerty noted that testing can be a time-consuming process.
Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down the productivity of labs capable of testing the meth, which can bog down the work even more.
“We’re kind of in the beginning stages of this but we’re tracking it, we do know that it is in the U.S. and we would assume easily that it is probably over this way (in the West Coast) too,” Haggerty said.
The practice of using an opiate-based drug paired with methamphetamine is not a particularly new occurrence. For many years it has been referred to as a “speed ball,” said Haggerty, but that was usually heroin or a painkiller mixed with methamphetamine.
What makes “monster meth” an alarming threat is the fentanyl that is cut into the methamphetamine, Haggarty said, which can be 80 to 100 times stronger than the fellow synthetic opioid morphine, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, synthetic opiates like fentanyl and fentanyl analogs were responsible for approximately 31,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2018.
