Fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin, is the deadliest serial killer of American adults ages 18-49. In 2022, it was responsible for two thirds of the 110,000 overdose deaths in the country, an all-time record. Against such a tragic backdrop, Secretary of State Antony Blinken virtually brought together representatives from 84 countries this Friday, a list that included Mexico, the main route of entry for the powerful substance into the United States, but not China, the third vertex of its global manufacture, trafficking and consumption, in a coalition to increase cooperation in the fight against this and other synthetic drugs.
Blinken tried in his initial speech to educate his counterparts with a graphic metaphor. “America is like the canary in the coal mine”: in other words, what is happening here with fentanyl will soon happen, he came to suggest, in the rest of the world. “Once they have saturated our market, the transnational criminal mafias are focusing elsewhere to increase their profits,” he told them. “If we don’t act together with fierce urgency, it will be a catastrophe.”
“Criminal organizations that traffic synthetic drugs are extremely adept at exploiting the weak links in our interconnected global system,” Blinken continued. “When a government aggressively restricts the precursor chemical, traffickers buy it elsewhere. When one country closes a transit route, traffickers quickly move to another. This is the definition of a problem that no country can solve alone. That is why we are creating this global coalition.”
Todd Robinson, deputy secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, confirmed China’s absence from the next day’s summit at a briefing with reporters in Washington on Thursday. “We have invited them,” he added, about a coalition that, he said, “is only at its beginning.” “There is hope [de que se sumen más adelante]. They don’t talk to us, but they are talking to other countries. And part of the reason we’re trying to put this coalition together is to get other countries involved in their efforts against these supply chains. Part of your responsibility will be to wring a commitment from the PRC. I’m sure it will pay off in the end.”
Blinken promised to organize more expert working sessions, as well as a face-to-face meeting during the UN General Assembly, scheduled for September. During the meeting on Friday, Ylva Johansson, European Commissioner for the Interior of the EU, also spoke, among others, who recalled that fentanyl is not yet as pressing a problem in Europe as it is in the United States.
In addition to the lethal opioid, on the agenda of the virtual meeting were ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, legal for use in the United States; MDMA, which is in its final phase of approval by the drug agency (FDA) for use in patients with disorders such as post-traumatic stress; the pain reliever tramadol; methamphetamine, which was the protagonist of the penultimate drug crisis in the North American country; or captagon, prescribed for attention deficit, narcolepsy or depression.
Blinken painted in his initial speech a map of the distribution of these drugs: “Every region is experiencing an alarming increase. In Africa, it’s tramadol; in the Middle East, fake captagon pills; in Asia, ketamine.”
Easier to manufacture and transport
Compared to other substances, synthetics are easier to manufacture and transport illegally. Thousands of fentanyl pills can be hidden in the hole that a bundle of heroin occupies. In 2022, the DEA (acronym in English for the drug enforcement agency) seized 50.6 million fake pills and 4,500 kilos of fentanyl powder, the equivalent of “more than 379 million potentially fatal doses”; more than enough, therefore, to wipe out the entire US population (some 330 million).
The United States’ relationship with fentanyl dates back to the 1990s, when pharmaceutical companies like Purdue flooded the market with pills called Oxycontin, which they marketed under the deception that they were not habit-forming. When doctors stopped prescribing them to a legion of addicts, they fell into the arms of heroin. Fentanyl, a drug invented in the 1960s that revolutionized anesthesiology, entered the scene around the middle of the last decade. At first, it came from China, a country that banned its export in 2019. Today, the precursor substances necessary for its manufacture are marketed from the Asian giant in Mexico, whose drug traffickers learned the formula, as well as the machines necessary to manufacture the fake pills.
On his recent visit to China, the issue was one of Blinken’s priorities. The Treasury Department recently decreed sanctions for 17 people and companies from the Asian country that they accuse of profiting from the business.
The pandemic aggravated the situation. In 2020, overdose deaths grew by 20%, to 91,799 cases. In 2021, 106,699 were registered, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, 16% more. The following year they exceeded 110,000. The issue has also become another front in the political war between Democrats and Republicans, whose most extremist members are calling on the Joe Biden Administration to intervene militarily in Mexico to head off the drug groups operating in the country, in a similar way to as was done with the Islamic State.
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