The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner said there are dangerous new developments with heroin that don't show signs of slowing down.
According to the numbers, heroin has its hooks in a surprising group of Northeast Ohioans.
"They're not just old heroin addicts, a great percentage of them got a legitimate injury on the job and started out with prescriptions and shifted to heroin use because they could no longer get the prescriptions," an official stated.
It's a dangerous cycle of addiction that's mainly affecting people between the age of 40 and 60.
While heroin deaths are down for the first time in years, a new trend has the county on its toes--fetanynl. It's a synthetic, stronger version of heroin and it killed three times as many people in the past year.
"There's roughly one person a day dying from one or both of these drugs and we've not seen that before," an official said.
Last month, there were 19 fentanyl deaths and 21 heroin deaths. Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Gilson called it a disturbing epidemic.
"We have never seen anything comparable to what we are seeing now, here, in other places I've worked, or in the country in general. It's truly an epidemic of enormous proportion."
