Upfront Gwinnett: Fighting Fentanyl (Part 2: A Deadly Design) In the second installment of Upfront Gwinnett: Fighting Fentanyl, we examine the lethal consequences of drug deals impacting neighborhoods across the County.

Gwinnett County Medical Examiner Dr. Carol Terry said she’s seeing an increase in fentanyl victims brought into the morgue, while police are going undercover to find the drug dealers responsible.

“To abuse fentanyl is like playing Russian Roulette,” Terry said. “It’s very, I guess humbling for me. Just daily, I see a whole segment of society that seems to just be dying off. “

Dr. Terry explained how she has witnessed an uptick in fentanyl-related deaths.

“This is driving my workload. Our numbers have skyrocketed in the past few years,” Terry said.

Data shows that in 2012, there were two deaths attributed to fentanyl in Gwinnett County. In the following year, there were three deaths.

In 2022, Gwinnett Police Narcotics Unit reported 527 overdoses and 135 of those were fatal overdoses. By June 2023, there have been 246 overdoses and 74 of those have been fatal.

Producers for Upfront Gwinnett spoke with an undercover officer with the Gwinnett Police Narcotics Unit. He said drug dealers are passing off fentanyl as a Percocet, a little blue pill marked with the letter ‘M’ and the number 30 on the back.

“Fentanyl has been around for a while, it’s a synthetic opioid it's manmade you can manufacture it in a lab. It's usually in a liquid form if it's been used by a hospital by EMS services but on the street, it's most likely going to be found in powder.... when you are talking about a powder you can mix that and make it look like anything,” the detective said.

“One thing to think about when you think about the drug fentanyl is when fentanyl is used appropriately in a medical setting it is a fine drug. It’s used for pain management, it's used for surgical procedures, but where it is particularly dangerous is where it is produced illicitly, and distributed illicitly,” Terry added.

The Drug Enforcement Agency reported fentanyl was “smuggled across the US-Mexico border in low concentration, high volume loads.”

Locally, police say borders and thoroughfares aren’t the only way dealers transport their products.

“It’s a bad business model but it's very cheap to produce and so you have people who are increasing their profit margins just by incorporating fentanyl in their product,” the officer said.

"A lot of people want to focus on young people. And it’s not so much just a young person thing,” Terry said. It's people who have a history of drug use and have a history of chronic pain problems and then maybe can’t get prescription medication.”

The Gwinnett County DA’s office is going after the dealers who kill their clients charging them with felony murder.