On this Tuesday morning, they are a small handful in front of the Family and Medical Counseling Service, Inc., or FMCS camper van parked in a black Washington neighborhood. This NGO exchanges used syringes and provides various aids to drug addicts. “Before, when we arrived, there were crowds, it was long queues, explains Tyrone Pinkney, one of the officials. But today so many people have died …” In Washington, as elsewhere in the United States, it’s a real hecatomb.
More than 100,000 Americans died of an overdose between April 2020 and April 2021, more than the combined total of deaths from road crashes and guns. The figures are staggering: overdose deaths have increased by nearly 30% compared to the previous year, and more than doubled since 2015. Two thirds of them are due to synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl.
A poster warning of the dangers of addiction to the painkiller fentanyl distributed in New York City on August 8, 2017
afp.com/SPENCER PLATT
This pain reliever 100 times more potent than morphine and much cheaper, made by traffickers and sold via social media or on the street, is often mixed surreptitiously cocaine, heroin, or fake OxyContin, Percocet, hydrocodone, or Xanax, which are normally prescription drugs.
–
Limited offer. 2 months for 1 € without commitment
–
According to the DEA, the federal drug control agency, 42% of the pills tested contained at least 2 milligrams, a potentially fatal dose. And the consumer, when buying them, often believes that they are real drugs and therefore does not know what they are ingesting. In 2016, singer Prince died of an accidental overdose. According to the prosecutor, he thought he was taking a Vicodin pill to relieve pain in his hip. He avalait actually fentanyl.
The singer Prince, in concert at the Grand Palais, October 11, 2009 in Paris
afp.com/BERTRAND GUAY
The opioid crisis is not new. In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies extolled, with huge marketing campaigns, the merits of OxyContin for back pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia (chronic condition, characterized by persistent diffuse pain) and all other chronic pain. This miracle pill has proven to be very addictive and less effective than advertised. And thousands of mothers, teens and retirees, who had been prescribed OxyContin by their doctors for sciatica, toothache or fracture, have found themselves addicted without knowing it.
When US authorities finally began to regulate access to these drugs, the effect was catastrophic. Consumers switched to black-market pills, often counterfeit, before turning to heroin and synthetic opioids starting in 2013. Like Colton. “I had never taken drugs in my life,” said this tall black man who works for FMCS. Following an injury, she was prescribed Percocet and other painkillers. “Gradually I became totally addicted, and I switched to heroin.” Today he is fine, but his wife, also addicted to it after a car accident, died of an overdose last year.
“We must stop frantically prescribing opioids by prescription”
These synthetic analgesics have another dramatic consequence. They wreak havoc even in those who do not use opioids. In February, 17-year-old Las Vegas college student Mia Gugino unwittingly took an ectasy pill mixed with fentanyl one night. At noon when her father entered her room, she was dying. “A single tablet can kill,” summed up the local police official. It is even found in marijuana. Since July in Connecticut, 39 people have overdosed after smoking weed.
The epidemic was already raging before the pandemic, but isolation, depression, limited access to treatment and especially naloxone, an antidote to overdose, exacerbated the crisis. Sitting in the FMCS association camper van, Terrence Cooper, another coordinator, is very pessimistic. “It’s tragic. The Covid has boosted the drug market. People want fentanyl because it’s better to get high. We have lost a lot of patients who have relapsed because their bodies were no longer ready for it. to tolerate such a strong substance. We are waging a very hard and endless struggle. ”
Fentanyl is very easy to produce, and earns its producers much more than cocaine or heroin. It comes mainly from China – as a component or as a finished product – and is transported to Mexico, where cartels collect it and smuggle it to the United States, most often in small quantities, making it difficult to intercept.
The overdose epidemic is “a national crisis” which “continues to worsen,” said Anne Milgram, patron of the DEA. The Biden administration has budgeted $ 2 billion in its economic stimulus package and another $ 11 billion in the proposed budget to improve prevention and treatment, and distribute more naloxone and rapid tests to help addicts detect traces of fentanyl in their products.
L’application L’Express
To follow the analysis and decryption wherever you are
–
Download the app
–
–
“Insufficient” measures for Dr Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University, one of the first to warn of the dangers of these pain relievers. “We must stop frantically prescribing opioids by prescription. We must then facilitate access to treatments such as buprenorphine, which treats addiction, but it remains expensive and complicated to obtain.” He is campaigning for the establishment of a large program on the model of the one created for AIDS, where drugs were accessible to all. “It’s a public health emergency,” he concludes. Especially since new drugs – protonitazene and isotonitazene – even more powerful than fentanyl and which require a higher dose of antidote in case of overdose are on the market.
Opinions
Chronic
Chronic
Diary of a Liberal
Chronic
–
