Roughly $170,000 worth of hydromorphone — a drug six to eight times stronger than morphine — stolen over the holiday weekend was recovered Tuesday by the GBI.
Driver Sammy Rogers told DeKalb County police the theft occurred while he was sleeping in the cab of his tractor-trailer at the Pilot Travel Center on Bouldercrest Road on Sunday evening or Monday morning.
Rogers said he awoke to discover someone had picked the lock of his truck and made off with the hydromorphone, which is used to treat moderate to severe pain.
The GBI’s Major Theft Unit, established in 2009 to deal with the large number of cargo thefts in Georgia, received an anonymous tip that led them to the stolen narcotics, said agency spokesman John Bankhead.
Recovering the drug was a “public safety issue,” said Bankhead, adding that 13 Georgians died in 2011 from hydromorphone overdoses.
The potent pain reliever can also prove deadly if mixed with alcohol, according to the website drugs.com. In 2005, Purdue Pharma voluntarily removed a product containing hydromorphone from the market following a request by the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA warned of “serious and potentially fatal adverse reactions” if the drug was mixed with alcohol.
Bankhead said that because the investigation is ongoing, he could not say where the hydromorphone was recovered or whether anyone was arrested in connection with the theft.
“We don’t know if the thieves were aware of what they were taking,” he said.
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