Your breathing slows as your consciousness slowly escapes you. You can hear yourself choking and gurgling as froth dribbles out of your mouth, but you don’t know what to do. You make a sluggish attempt to prop yourself up, but your limp arms give out beneath you. Soon, your heavy eyelids shut and then it’s over. In just five minutes, a fentanyl overdose has killed you.
Fentanyl is a type of opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Pharmaceutically, it’s prescribed by doctors as a hard painkiller, but illicit production has significantly lowered the price and transformed the drug into a highly potent and addictive substance.
Fentanyl becomes even deadlier when its powder form is mixed with other drugs like heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine through a process called “lacing”. Doses as small as two milligrams can be lethal, and it’s nearly impossible to tell if drugs are laced because of the absence of any discernible smell, taste, or look. That lethal dosage is as small as just five grains of sand, yet it has the potential to kill a full-grown adult.
In recent years, fentanyl has seen an astonishing user increase in the US. Over the course of three years—from 2019 to 2022—the number of fentanyl overdose deaths more than doubled. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 73,654 people died due to fentanyl overdose in 2022; that’s 200 people a day. By then, it had caused nearly 70% of all drug overdoses.
In a 2023 Congressional hearing regarding the fentanyl crisis, DEA Special Agent Derek Maltz said, “In my view, fentanyl is a chemical weapon, and the narco-terrorists in Mexico are destroying our country… The cartels are taking total advantage of weak security at the porous border, killing more Americans than any terrorist organization in the history of the country.”
Experts suspect that the rise in illicit fentanyl use is a result of the decline in opioid prescription rates. Most of it is made in Mexico by drug cartels and then smuggled into the southern states of the US to distributors. A singular year of DEA drug busts reportedly seized about 700 pounds of fentanyl; that amount alone could kill half the population of the United States. The total amount that the DEA is seizing is only estimated to be 10-15 percent of the overall amount being introduced into the US.
During the Congressional hearing, New York Committee member Jerrold Nadler said, “We must get to the root causes of addiction and substance abuse, or we will end the war on fentanyl, only to have a war on the next, even deadlier drug.”
Governments in both Mexico and America need to make an organized effort to quell the growing threats of the Mexican cartels. Whether it be DEA raids on drug labs or military operations to target cartel strongholds, it’s crucial that they attack the root of the drug problem, not just the distributors. As more potent drugs emerge, the consequences of inaction are becoming increasingly inconceivable.
The government must take action to not only disrupt the flow of fentanyl into the country but also reduce the demand for it. Erin Rachwal, the founder of an anti-fentanyl foundation, described that from her experience, more than half of the students she had spoken to stated they didn’t even know what fentanyl was. Introducing fentanyl education into school curriculums can prevent teenagers from submitting to peer pressure or using it as a stress reliever.
“They’re using social media platforms to get what they need,” Maltz said. “It’s as simple as ordering food. The cartels have invaded our homes.”
Fentanyl has the capability to kill millions and is on track to do so if the government doesn’t intervene to combat the rising drug epidemic in the US. It’s poisoning the American people—all while supplying them with false sensations of euphoria—and must be stopped for the welfare of the US.