Fentanyl raises US overdose deaths to all-time high

A man holds a vial with enough fentanyl to kill a person.Jacquelyn Martin (AP)

Police in Oakland, the neighboring city of San Francisco, reported this Wednesday the discovery of six kilos of fentanyl hidden in a car parked in front of a high school.

Inside the car, officers also found $139,000 and a package of heroin.

The powerful opiate, however, exceeded six times the amount of the drug, which reflects how this substance has flooded the streets of the United States and triggered the deaths of users.

The seizure is one more among the dozens of operations that various law enforcement agencies in the United States have undertaken against this synthetic drug, responsible for 66% of overdose deaths in the nation, according to official figures published this morning.

Deaths from the use of synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl (50 times more powerful than heroin), went from 58,000 in 2020 to 71,200 a year later, an increase of 23%.

Along with methamphetamines, which caused 33,000 deaths in 2021, 34%.

These are the substances that claimed the most lives last year.

This Wednesday, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that 107,602 people died from substance abuse, an increase of 14.9% compared to the previous period.

With the exception of 2018, the number of accidental overdose deaths is growing every year.

Since the year 2000, there are more than a million victims.

"We've never seen anything like this," said Robert Anderson, the CDC's mortality statistics manager, this morning.

The center actually documented 103,500 cases, but warns that this is a provisional number and that it will grow in the coming months, once coroners confirm some suspected deaths that are being reviewed.

Daniel Ciccarone, an academic from the University of California specializing in drugs, has argued that the increase in the supply of fentanyl is due, among several factors, to the fact that its production is cheaper than that of heroin.

So the substance, a white powder, has replaced heroin in times of shortage.

Its presence is not limited to the United States, as it has caused deaths in several European countries, especially Estonia, Latvia and Sweden.

Canada has also seen the number of accidental overdoses increase.

Fentanyl is no longer a contained problem in some areas of the United States.

Between 2014 and 2017, it caused a large number of deaths in the Northwest and Midwest of the country, mainly white Caucasians.

In 2017 and 2018, however, it spread west, claiming thousands of victims, notably in San Francisco.

Black and Latino communities also began to notice the increase in deaths as supply increased.

China is no longer the main exporter of this substance, which is legal and is used to reduce chronic pain, for example, in cancer patients.

Mexico and India began to make shipments in the form of smuggled pills.

The fentanyl overdose epidemic is not just the work of the illegal market.

The pharmaceutical company Perdue Pharma, manufacturer of the opiate OxyContin, has been accused of being responsible for a series of addictions by promoting the prescription of the drug as an analgesic.

This has caused a public health crisis since 2016. The company, owned by the Sackler family, filed for bankruptcy last year after local authorities flooded the courts with more than 2,600 lawsuits.

In early April, the DEA, the government drug enforcement agency, alerted police forces across the country of an increase in the number of mass overdoses.

“In the last two months alone, there have been seven, which have left 58 overdoses and 29 deaths,” said Anne Milgram, the head of that agency.

"Last year left more deaths from fentanyl than the sum of deaths from firearms and car accidents," added the official.

Authorities have explained that drug traffickers are mixing fentanyl with other substances such as methamphetamine or cocaine to further hook their customers.

Agents have found that those who think they are using cocaine are actually taking the powerful opiate.

It has also been found in pills that mimic prescription drugs like OxyContin, Percocet, Xanax, and Vicodin.

"All of this is creating a terrible national trend where many overdose victims are dying because they are unknowingly ingesting fentanyl," the DEA said.

The agency has launched the alarms for 2022, a year that can deepen a deadly trend that is going further.

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