Fentanyl has almost completely replaced heroin on the Bulgarian drug market, and the illegal laboratory dismantled near Sofia may be the only one in the country. This was stated by the acting Chief Secretary of the Ministry of Interior Lyubomir Nikolov in “The Day Begins“. According to him, the police have been monitoring the spread of the dangerous synthetic drug for four months, and the investigation is continuing to identify all participants and the channels for supplying precursors. Nikolov explained that the development began about four months ago, when investigators detected the first shipments to various settlements.
„We have no information on when the laboratory started operating, but we have been developing the case for about four months. Then we detected the first shipments that reached from Sofia to various places in the country. The moment we established that individuals were entering the base daily with protective equipment and working with dangerous substances, we immediately proceeded to implementation, because every gram that was released on the market caused enormous harm to the generation.“, Nikolov further commented.
According to him, the police managed to intercept part of the supplies through parallel actions against dealers in various cities. The Secretary General emphasized that so far there is no evidence that the fentanyl produced in our country was part of international trafficking.
„We have not detected a single gram of imported or exported drugs of this type. All analyses led to the conclusion that the production is located on the territory of the country and the drug is distributed through internal trafficking to various settlements“, Nikolov said.
According to him, it is not excluded that the dismantled laboratory is the only one of its kind in Bulgaria.
„If after the operation we find that there is already a shortage on the market or the drug disappears, this will mean that we have done our job. However, if the distribution continues, we will look for other similar depots. I am sure that we will reach them, if they exist.“
Nikolov pointed out that the Ministry of Interior has been monitoring the trend for several years.
„We have been monitoring the distribution of fentanyl more actively for about three or four years. In practice, it has almost completely replaced heroin. It has appeared in its place and satisfies the same group of addicted users, but it is cheaper and more accessible. That's why we need to focus our efforts on cutting off its production," he said.
According to him, the people who produced the drug were not professional chemists.
"They were not professionals, they were self-taught. They had read a lot of literature and watched a lot of videos on the Internet. Despite this, they were doing quite well, because the quality of the material we found was high," Nikolov said.