Federal attorney, father of opioid overdose victim share experiences with community members

The graphs Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Reinert brought to a community meeting last week were clear – the rate of opioid overdoses in Iowa has been drastically increasing in the past five years.
“The rate of change in the Midwest outpaces the rest of the country,” Reinert said to the crowd that filled the sanctuary at Evangelical Covenant Church north of Pomeroy April 11.
He showed a picture of an oxycodone pill and a picture of one of 800 pills seized in a drug raid in Iowa that dealers told buyers was oxycodone. Even seasoned investigators would have been fooled by the appearance, Reinert said, but lab tests showed the pill contained a far more dangerous cocktail that included carfentanil, a synthetic opioid 10,000 times stronger than morphine. 
Read more in the April 18 edition.