Dr. Karl Williams says he normally sees three or four deaths from drug overdoses in a typical week as the chief medical examiner in Pennsylvania 's Allegheny County , which includes Pittsburgh . In the past week , he saw 15 -- men and women , of various ethnicities , ranging in age from 22 to 53 . All of them appear to have been heroin users who instead received a mix of heroin and fentanyl , a powerful narcotic used to treat cancer patients ' pain , Williams told CNN . `` This is pretty clearly somebody manufacturing fentanyl and selling it as heroin , '' Williams said . The deaths Williams has recorded are among nearly two dozen in western Pennsylvania linked to a heroin-fentanyl mix , state Attorney General Kathleen Kane said Monday . The `` extremely dangerous and potentially lethal '' combination has killed 22 people in six counties , Kane said in a written statement . `` We are working with the Allegheny County Police Department , the Pittsburgh Police , and their counterparts in the region to get this deadly mix of heroin off the streets of Western Pennsylvania , and to arrest and prosecute anyone caught selling , distributing , and producing these drugs , '' her statement said . Williams said fentanyl can be 10-100 times more potent than morphine , the base molecule in heroin , and it 's only distributed as a powder when someone is manufacturing it illegally . The drug is being distributed in bags marked `` Income Tax , '' `` Bud Ice '' and `` Theraflu , Williams said . `` This is not accidental . Somebody is deliberately trying to make a big batch of fentanyl , '' he said . `` It is not an extraordinarily complex molecule to synthesize , and you can find instructions on the Internet . It does not take a sophisticated chemist to do this . '' It 's not the first time that fentanyl has turned up on the streets of Pittsburgh . In 1988 , Williams said , 17 people died when a chemist distributed fentanyl as heroin . And in 2006 , in Philadelphia , 269 people were killed by fentanyl overdoses , the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs said . The agency raised new alarms about fentanyl in July , blaming it for 50 deaths in Pennsylvania by mid-2013 . Bags of heroin labeled `` Obama Care '' seized .
` ` This is not accidental , '' Pittsburgh medical examiner says . It is used to treat pain in cancer patients . Mixing it with alcohol is ` ` extremely dangerous '' No , prosecutor says .