The increased availability of synthetic drugs has caused an increase in the number of people addicted to methamphetamine and fentanyl in the United States.
In 2021 alone, more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths were recorded in the United States and at least 71,000 were related to synthetic drugs, according to the CDC.
And it is that drugs like P2P are very easy to produce, which makes it possible for more people to have access to them.
"It's something that hasn't happened before, Mexican traffickers have covered the entire country from Los Angeles to Maine with these devastating drugs," said Sam Quinones, LA Times journalist and author of the book True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, at a press conference organized by Ethnic Media Services in which experts met to discuss the problem of addiction to synthetic drugs in the American union.
Quiñones specified that methamphetamine and fentanyl are drugs that can be easily produced and that traffickers in Mexico have opted for them.
“The way they are producing methamphetamine in Mexico allows it to be produced in quantities that we have never seen before, plus it is much purer and more potent,” he stressed.
In addition, he pointed out that these drugs ?that come from Mexico? now they are much more harmful and possibly lethal, even in a single dose. "There is no such thing as a long-term fentanyl addict," he pointed out.
Quinones also said that according to his investigations, most of the drugs produced in Mexico are transported in trucks or cars and that most of the time they are introduced into the country as legitimate pills.
He also pointed out that an example of this was the case of the blue pills that looked like oxycodone.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in the rate of addiction in the country and, coupled with this, the number of deaths from overdose, not only in adults but also in young people.
According to Quinones, due to the quarantine and the fact that young people could not leave the house, drug sellers offered them through social networks such as Snapchat, and he said that he even attended a march in which parents protested against drugs. that phenomenon.
"People were selling drugs with 10 very colorful menus that resembled the menu of an ice cream truck," he denounced.
They warn about the danger of synthetic drugs
The emergency doctor John ?who preferred to remain anonymous?, pointed out the seriousness of the problem of the high number of admissions of patients to hospitals due to overdoses and said that in Chicago at first they were mostly for heroin, however, the number of affected by fentanyl began to increase as well as methamphetamine overdoses.
The doctor pointed out that because drugs such as methamphetamine or fentanyl, coming from Mexico, are so pure? and harmful? that cause a psychosis that can last even years.
"Heroin, morphine, oxycodone, the typical opioids before fentanyl, are dosed in milligrams, while fentanyl is dosed in micrograms," the doctor said, intending to point out the potency of this drug.
Finally, John pointed out that due to the increase in COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, as well as respiratory diseases in the winter season, hospitals do not have the capacity to care for patients who arrive with an overdose, because the beds are needed to treat other diseases.
"The health system does not have sufficient capacity to address this problem," he concluded.
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