Three people in Alaska have died from overdosing on a new synthetic opioid known as "pink" or "pinky," according to state public health officials.
Responding to what it called an "imminent threat to public health and safety" the Drug Enforcement Agency announced Thursday that it had placed the compound, formally known as U-47700, into its most restrictive category of banned drugs, effective Monday.
Pink — developed in labs and sold on the internet — has killed 46 people around the United States, according to the DEA's statement.
But there had not been any confirmed overdose cases in Alaska until the deaths were first reported last week by the state Division of Public Health.
It's not clear how widespread pink is in Alaska, but public health officials say such "designer drugs" are stoking Alaska's ongoing opioid crisis in a dangerous way.
Made in a lab, sold on the internet
The three Alaska overdose cases happened in different communities "scattered around the state," according to Division of Public Health head Jay Butler.
The first happened in November 2015, the second in May and a third in September, according to a public health bulletin. All of the victims were men. Two were described as young adults and the third as a man in his 30s.
They were discovered when extensive toxicology testing showed the presence of the obscure chemical compound called U-47700.
U-47700 was created by a pharmaceutical company in the 1970s, where it was tested to be about eight times stronger than morphine. It was never approved for human use.
The Washington Post reported that it languished for decades, showing up only in a patent application and a few scientific papers. Then, in 2012, a U-47700 overdose killed someone in Norway.
In 2015, it popped up for sale on internet sites, where it is often marketed as a "research chemical," and purchased as an alternative to heroin or fentanyl, according to a DEA briefing. It's thought to have originated in labs in China.
News that people have died from pink in Alaska just shows that the state is not immune to the emergence of substances already being abused in the Lower 48, Butler said.
"It confirms our suspicions that what's been observed in the Lower 48 is not restricted to down there," he said.
The profile of pink was recently elevated when two 13-year-old boys in Utah died after using it.
It was not clear how the victims in Alaska got the drug, which comes in different forms but can be mixed with heroin.
"There are certainly anecdotes that people think they are using heroin or fentanyl," Butler said. "This stuff doesn't come with a list of ingredients."
New drugs all the time
Synthetic opioids created in labs are emerging at a rate faster than they can be regulated.
In September, the DEA moved to make an emergency classification of U-47700 as a Schedule I drug, the most restrictive category.
Michael Duxbury, the captain of the Alaska Department of Public Safety's statewide drug enforcement unit, said law enforcement agencies have seen scattered anecdotes about pink showing up in communities.
"I know of at least one instance where someone has been able to buy it from a smoke shop," Duxbury said.
He takes the news about another novel synthetic drug as a symptom of a much bigger, more complex problem: The ongoing hunger for opioids mixed with other drugs.
"We don't have a single opioid problem," he said. "But opioid is a component of almost all the drug issues we have."
This year, not a single one of the overdose deaths attributed to opioids in Alaska involved just heroin alone, according to the epidemiology bulletin.
All 30 of them reported as of Sept. 15 involved a mix of drugs.