PROVIDENCE – A Rhode Island Hospital opioid expert is leading a study that has found that using two separate methods to check for fentanyl in street drugs is the safest approach.
Fentanyl test strips are best at detecting the potent synthetic opioid, but an infrared spectrometer can detect other contaminants or drugs by providing a detailed chemical profile.
“This study showed us that there are valid and easy-to-use devices that can provide critical insights that are meaningful to both people who use drugs and public health decision-makers,” said Traci Green, the study’s lead author.
Green is co-director of Rhode Island Hospital’s Center of Biomedical Research Excellence on Opioids and Overdose.
“Public health has built an impressive capacity to quickly detect harmful bacteria when it enters the food supply, which prevents sickness and death,” Green added. “Why not try to apply the same principles to the illicit drug supply and protect the health of all the consumers? We shouldn’t have to wait for an overdose, a death or an investigation to know what’s in our communities when we have tools [such as] these to help us guide action and harm-reduction.”
The study, recently published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, was also led by Susan Sherman, a professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society.
Sherman, Green and other researchers found that 64% of people who died from an opioid overdose in Rhode Island in 2017 tested positive for fentanyl. The same year, fentanyl was a factor in 85% of fatal opioid overdoses in Massachusetts.
Testing street drugs is one way to help reduce overdose deaths, researchers say.
Green and her colleagues tested more than 200 samples of police-confiscated street drugs using several devices and concluded that the combination of fentanyl testing strips and infrared spectrometer were most effective.
The team worked with the R.I. Department of Health and the Providence and Baltimore police departments to test the drugs.
Research was funded by a grant from the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
