Counterfeit prescription pills loaded with fentanyl a growing menace in overdose crisis

CHICAGO — It’s hard to be sure what Alissa Saunders thought she was taking the night she died of a drug overdose — a ground-up Percocet, maybe, or a pulverized bar of Xanax.

One thing seems clear enough, though: She didn’t know it was fentanyl.

Saunders, a 22-year-old certified nursing assistant who loved to camp, fish and hang out with her family, was found unresponsive last March in the New Lenox townhouse she shared with a roommate, a straw flecked with powdered residue on the nightstand beside her.

Detectives investigating her death found text messages and a Snapchat video suggesting a friend had introduced her to black market prescription pills, which drug users often smash and snort for a more intense high. But what was in her bloodstream was fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than