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miamiherald |  The drug deaths of the three young men this year shared a common thread, one that ties them to scores of other overdose, suicide, accident and even murder victims in Miami-Dade and Broward counties: The synthetic substances medical examiners found in their bodies most likely arrived though the China Pipeline, which delivers illegal drugs, sold as bulk research chemicals on the Internet, to stateside dealers through the mail.

Authorities are scrambling to shut down the pipeline but they acknowledge that it remains the primary source of an array of dangerous so-called designer drugs flowing into South Florida. The grim result: a rising number of addicts, emergency room visits and deaths — particularly related to newer, more potent synthetics like infamous flakka and the less known —but even more lethal —fentanyl.

“This is Breaking Bad gone wild,” said George Hime, assistant director of the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s toxicology lab. “There is no quality control. They don’t even know what they’ve created. Is it something that can cause pleasure for a short period of time? Yes. But it could also kill you.”

Flakka has run rampant among the homeless and in poor corners of Broward, offering a cheap and powerful rush aptly described as “$5 insanity.” Flakka, street slang for a chemical called alpha-PVP, induced one man up the coast in Brevard County to strip, proclaim himself the Norse god Thor and try to have sex with a tree. Two other men, suffering a serious flakka-fueled lapse in judgment, tried to break into Fort Lauderdale police headquarters.

Fentanyl users haven’t produced such attention-grabbing crazy rages, but the drug has quietly proven even deadlier in South Florida, according to a Miami Herald review of medical examiner records in both Miami-Dade and Broward counties. A fast-acting painkiller 50 times more potent than heroin, it has been used as a surgical analgesic for decades.

But investigators believe that underground labs in China fueling the synthetics pipeline have concocted illegal fentanyl as well as chemically tweaked “analogs” that are typically sold as heroin or mixed with it.

“Fentanyl and its analogs are often laced in heroin and are extremely dangerous, more so than alpha-PVP,” said Diane Boland, director of the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s toxicology lab. “People are dying at an alarming rate, especially those who believe they are using heroin when it’s in fact fentanyl. A small dose is enough to cause death.”

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