olice in Palm Beach County have discovered the presence of a synthetic opioid that is considered up to 50 times more potent than fentanyl.
The drug, N-Desethyl Isotonitazene, or ISO, has been detected in only one other city in the United States, according to Mike Jachles, West Palm Beach Police Department’s public information officer. Philadelphia’s health department said in a March alert that the drug was first detected in the Pennsylvania city in December 2022.
West Palm Beach police’s Organized Crime Unit seized 20 kilograms of ISO while conducting a search warrant on a house and storage unit in the Palm Beach County area. Jachles said that police first received a tip in February that led to the seizure and the arrest of one individual, who was not named. Police estimate that the ISO found is worth roughly $1.6 million. Several guns and ammunition were also retrieved in the arrest.
“Basically, we took a lot of poison off the streets,” Jachles told Newsweek. “And this is serious, this is scary. It is a public health issue.”
Jachles said that the trafficker who was caught selling the ISO was distributing the drug in forms that mimicked other narcotics, such as OxyContin and Percocet. Police say that the synthetic opioid can be from 40 to 50 times more potent than pharmacy-grade fentanyl.
The report comes amid an ongoing fentanyl crisis across the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 107,543 Americans died from a drug overdose last year. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl were responsible for 70 percent of all deaths.
“This is not just a one city problem,” Jachles said. “You know, illegal drugs transcends all socio-economic levels, races, everything. So it’s not just in one area or one locale.”
According to a 2022 release from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) division in Washington, D.C., ISO can appear yellow, brown or off-white in color when in a powder form, and officials have seen the drug mixed into heroin and fentanyl. Officials said that the drug “is being mixed into and marketed as other drugs to make drugs more potent and cheaper to produce. The major concern: This drug can and has caused deadly overdoses in unsuspecting victims.”
The DEA noted that ISO’s “high potency comes with an increased risk of overdose.”
“Tragically, many of these overdose victims have no idea they are ingesting these dangerous and extremely potent drugs,” read the release. “The DEA says these synthetic opioids currently can only be properly identified after a lab test, so people don’t realize they’re buying them until it’s too late.”
