Gulfport Police warn of 'bad batch' of drugs on the street

GULFPORT, MS (WLOX) - Gulfport Police are sending out a warning in the hope of preventing a death.

Chief Leonard Papania held a news conference Monday morning to warn about a bad batch of oxycodone currently on the streets of the coast. He said the drug is being sold as Oxycodone, but it's actually a potentially fatal dose of Fentanyl.

"Over the course of the past few weeks, Gulfport narcotic detectives have seized multiple blue pills marked with an "A 215" which indicates that the pills are Oxycodone. When the pills were analyzed at the DEA laboratory the pills were found to contain Fentanyl with no Oxycodone present," Papania explained.

No one on the coast has died as a result of this latest batch of counterfeit drugs. And police aren't sure how much of the drug is currently on the coast. Police are hoping to prevent accidental overdoses with this warning.

Investigators with the Gulfport Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency are working to identify the source of these counterfeit tablets. Anyone who has information about illegal narcotic activity should call Gulfport Police at (228) 868-5959.

"A lot of people will watch this and their kneejerk reaction is going to be, 'Well, it's just another pillhead or an addict dying from this. What's the loss?' The opioid addiction issue that's facing our city and the rest of the nation is far-reaching. It reaches into our own families and our friends, and we need to get serious about addressing it," Chief Papania said.

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