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Three Arlington police officers sickened; fentanyl-laced heroin may be cause

Photo from Arlington Police Department.

Three Arlington police officers had to be rushed to the Emergency Room at Cascade Valley Hospital on Monday after a drug-bust in a motel room near I-5 on State Route 530.

The suspected cause – fentanyl, an opioid 50-times stronger and more deadly than heroin.

All three officers -- two men and one woman -- were treated and released from the hospital within hours after responding to a second-floor room at the Arlington Motor Inn.

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No one is allowed to rent the room until it has been cleared by the Snohomish Health District, according to Kristin Banfield of the city of Arlington.

Banfield said the three officers were responding to a call when one of the motel room’s occupants apparently did not want to be arrested.  “She picked up heroin and immediately started smoking it and blowing that smoke directly at our officers,” Banfield told KIRO 7 on Wednesday.

While doing follow-up paperwork at the police station, the officers suddenly started vomiting and had to be rushed to the emergency room.

Lab tests are being done, but Arlington Police suspect it was heroin laced with fentanyl, the same drug that killed pop star Prince and 70 people in Washington State last year.

Caleb Banta-Green of the University of Washington’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute said fentanyl is dangerous because, “you have a drug that’s being sold on the street, you don’t know what it is, you have no idea how strong it is.”

Law enforcement officers all over the country have been sickened by fentanyl while responding to calls.

In Pittsburgh last week, 18 were overcome when three suspects packaging powdered fentanyl suddenly overturned a table, causing the powder to spread through the air.

In response, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein described how deadly fentanyl can be: “Just two milligrams, the equivalent of a few grains of salt, the amount that could fit on the tip of your finger can be lethal.”

Because of the increasing threat of fentanyl, Arlington police are now doing what other agencies have already adopted -- double-gloving and calling in lab techs to process suspicious scenes, often in full hazmat suits.

Anthony First of the Tulsa Police Department said “regular latex gloves are simply not thick enough to stop this drug from passing through them.”