The heroin believed to have killed two Porter County men last week, one of them a Chesterton resident, was not tainted or otherwise doctored.

Porter County Coroner Vicki Deppe told the Chesterton Tribune on Wednesday that the result of a test conducted on a sample of the heroin recovered from the scene indicates that it was not tainted, either by a narcotic or by any other foreign substance.

The test did not reveal the purity of the heroin, however, Deppe said. The results of a quantitative test are still pending.

At 11:30 p.m. Jan. 28 the bodies of Troy Wright, 30, of Chesterton, and Daniel Leggitt, 31, of Porter Township, were found in Leggitt’s residence at 29 Sunset St. Heroin, syringes, and other paraphernalia were recovered from the scene, and the fact that the men died together, presumably after ingesting a quantity of heroin from the same batch, raised at least the possibility that the heroin may have been tainted with another substance. That is not the case.

Results from a toxicology screen will not be available for some weeks, but Deppe had requested an expedited test of the heroin itself to determine its content.

Between April 2005 and August 2006 some 200 deaths in Cook County, Ill., were attributed to heroin laced with fentanyl, a powerful pain killer, and hundreds more were across the country. At least one death in Porter County was blamed on the fentanyl-spiked heroin, in 2005, and possibly several lives were saved when the Porter County Drug Task Force, in February 2006, seized a quantity of the stuff in an undercover operation in Portage.

Posted 2/7/2008