A REPUTED Chicago gang member has become the first person to be charged with murder for selling the supercharged heroin that has killed hundreds of addicts in America in recent months.

Corey Crump, 35, is charged with the drug-induced homicide of the teenage son of a Chicago-area police chief whose body was found slumped in his car. He was clutching tin-foil packets of the drug cocktail in one hand.

The heroin was cut with fentanyl — an opiate used in anaesthesia that is up to 100 times more potent than morphine. It has caused more than 400 fatal overdoses nationwide since it hit the streets of Chicago. Efforts to warn drug-users have backfired as addicts seeking the drug’s powerful high have flocked to areas where police say that the tainted heroin is being sold.

So strong is its appeal that it is sold on the street with names such as “Bone Crusher” and “Get High or Die Trying”.

The heroin-fentanyl combination can kill a user before he removes his needle by causing the rib-cage muscles to seize. The equivalent of three grains of salt — or 125 micrograms — can be lethal.

Because the mixture often kills before an ambulance can arrive, some needle exchange programmes have started giving addicts prescriptions for an antidote, naloxone, to keep on hand in case of an overdose. Authorities believe that the drug combination is being smuggled from Mexico. In May Mexican police raided a laboratory in Toluca and arrested five men, one a chemist suspected of manufacturing the painkiller to be mixed with heroin.

The first murder charge stems from the death of Joseph Krecker, 17, who was found on June 6 in his Jeep Cherokee on the West Side of Chicago, half a block from where he allegedly bought drugs from Mr Crump. Mr Crump was described by prosecutors as a street corner drug-dealer who had been in and out of prison for convictions including drug possession, armed robbery and aggravated battery. If convicted, he faces 30 years in jail.

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