KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) – The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) has agents working on drug crimes in the field and its labs. Like many places across the country, fentanyl takes up a major part of the caseload.
“It wasn’t until it became popular in the illicit front that fentanyl now is everywhere,” Special Agent in Charge Tommy Farmer said. Farmer is with the drug division and manages the Tennessee Dangerous Drugs Task Force.
The Task Force has been in the works for more than 20 years. It’s a collaborative team made up of state, local and federal partners.
“It’s a large comprehensive group that comes together and watches over what those emerging drug trends are and how we need to address them,” Farmer said.
Farmer says there are over 2,000 analogs of fentanyl.
“We started seeing acetyl and acryl and those were stronger,” Farmer said. “A hundred to five hundred times more powerful than morphine. And that’s just simply evolved. Now we’re seeing a whole new group of nidizines and some of these are as strong as 20 times more powerful than morphine. “It’s just a whack a mole. We have to identify it again, figure out the standards, and figure out what it is. And then control it or try to get it moved to a controlled substance.”