ATLANTA (CBS46) - The number of overdoses in Georgia believed to be linked to counterfeit pain medication is growing.
The Georgia Poison Center reports 48 overdoses in June, five of them deadly.
"That's pretty astonishing when you look at just a short two and a half week period when all these cases came in," said Dr. Gaylord Lopez, the director of the Georgia Poison Center.
Lab tests will confirm what the patients ingested, but Lopez said fake Percocet pills are suspected. Most of them occurred in central Georgia. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation's crime lab discovered the pills contain a mix of two dangerous, synthetic opioids.
"A lot of these patients have required high doses of antidote and that’s quite unusual to get so much antidote for so little of an ingestion. Clearly something's wrong with that picture when you have to be that aggressive," said Lopez.
"We got 15 consecutive days of calls. Yesterday was the first day we didn’t get a call about this fake Percocet," Lopez told CBS46.
He is hopeful the word is getting out about the dangerous drugs sold on the street, but is concerned about what might pop up next.
"These drug dealers, they’re moving onto the next great thing for them to sell and make money off of," he said.
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