If you are concerned about America’s continuing substance-abuse problem, you should go to The Washington Post website and read a detailed series of stories about fentanyl’s rapidly growing death toll.
If an extensive report on fentanyl doesn’t appeal to you — admittedly, this is a sad topic on so many levels, from individual addictions and deaths to government agencies failing to keep up with rapid changes in drug manufacturing — the information before the headline in the overview story of the series provides everything you need to know:
• 107,622 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021. Fentanyl was responsible for two-thirds of those deaths (about 72,000).
• The number of Americans killed by the drug has jumped 94% since 2019.
• On average, one person dies of a fentanyl overdose in the United States every seven minutes. The latest estimate is 196 deaths per day.
• Fentanyl kills more people than automobile accidents. And more people than gunshots. And more than suicides.
The Post attributes fentanyl’s rise in the last several years to the federal crackdown on opioid prescriptions. The drug manufacturers needed to be reined in, but the end result, it said, was that “Millions of Americans who had become addicted to prescription pain pills suddenly found them difficult or impossible to get.”
Enter the Mexican drug cartels. They used to produce plant-based drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin. But they have switched their focus to fentanyl, using chemicals in laboratories to produce the drug in powder and pill forms for an American market that, despite the rising death toll, continues to increase.
This has been noted before, but needs to be repeated. Heroin, oxycodone and morphine are dangerous drugs — addictive if overused. Fentanyl is in a different league. It is 50 times stronger than heroin, 67 times stronger than oxy and 100 times stronger than morphine.
This is what the world has come to: Oxycodone, the active drug in opioids, and heroin — each of which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths — have been outclassed by an even more powerful, and popular, drug.
Another story in the series, “Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America,” reports that San Diego, because of its location along the Mexican border, is ground zero for fentanyl smuggling.
Much of the fentanyl brought into the United States is hidden in passenger vehicles or commercial trucks that pass through official U.S. ports of entry.
Border walls will not stop this scourge. What’s needed are better ways to scan vehicles to find the drug mules.
Officials in San Diego estimate they only intercept 5% to 10% of the fentanyl coming in. But they say it could be even less than that. America and its drug detectives have lots of catching up to do, which indicates that the number of fentanyl deaths will continue to rise. What a tragedy.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
