There is talk of a death from drug use in general in this country every four and a half minutes and there are no quick solutions, experts warn.
The magnitude of this calamity now dwarfs all previous drug epidemics, from the 1980s to the opioid crisis of the 2000s.”We’ve seen an entire community devastated,” Louise Vincent, a harm reduction activist in North Carolina, told NPR, the public radio system, who says she sometimes still uses street opioids, including fentanyl.
“We’ve seen an entire community devastated. I can’t even think of all the people I know who have died. My daughter died. Our mentors are dead. It’s very dangerous right now,” she lamented.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid much more powerful than heroin, which is associated with the majority of drug deaths in a nation where the large supply market for illegal narcotics is increasingly dangerous.
Americans who use drugs recreationally or are trapped in more serious addictions face an unpredictable cocktail that often includes fentanyl, methamphetamines and a rapidly changing mix of new chemicals, the NPR report highlighted.
The most recent threats include the horse tranquilizer xylazine, which causes persistent skin wounds in users, and nitacenes, synthetic opioids that appear to be even more potent than fentanyl, they warned.
The issue is a matter of debate among politicians, with Republicans criticizing Joe Biden’s administration for failing to stop fentanyl smugglers.
“We have had more Americans killed by fentanyl than in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam combined,” said Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and candidate to the Republican presidential nomination.
The NPR report commented that when the history of the fentanyl crisis is written, 2023 may be remembered as the year Americans woke up to an unprecedented threat plaguing communities and a deepening cultural divide over what to do about it.
Meanwhile, with few options for treatment, many communities, grassroots organizations and families have turned to a strategy known as “harm reduction”, designed to keep people alive while they use drugs until they can begin some form of recovery.
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