Fentanyl trafficking tests America’s foreign policy
opioid epidemic has been shaped by changes in supply. First pharmaceutical companies blanketed the country in legal painkillers. Doctors expanded the use of opioids against chronic pain, such as backache, in the false belief that the risks of addiction were extremely low.
By the time OxyContin was reformulated in 2010 to make it harder to abuse, Mexican traffickers were peddling cheap heroin sent to addicts’ doorsteps. Around 2014, more Americans started fatally overdosing on fentanyl, 50 times more potent than heroin, which traffickers had mixed in with heroin or cocaine. Overdose deaths rocketed (see chart).
Drug overdoses, most of them from fentanyl, killed nearly 108,000 people in the 12 months to August 2022, more than the number of Americans who died fighting wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Ever more seems to be entering the country. Nearly 14,000 pounds of fentanyl was seized between October and March, almost as much as the total for fiscal-year 2022.
Most of the people convicted of fentanyl trafficking between 2018 and 2021 were American citizens, not Mexicans or asylum-seekers. The epidemic is mutating again. Fentanyl is being mixed with xylazine, or tranq, an animal tranquilliser that can amplify its effects.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 23% of fentanyl powder and 7% of pills seized in 2022 contained xylazine. Because tranq is not an opioid, an overdose cannot be reversed with naloxone, a live-saving antidote. Officials in California are worried about addicts shifting from ingesting pills to smoking fentanyl powder.
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