Overdose-related deaths are the highest they’ve ever been in the UK, and a super-strong new drug is hitting the streets
FILE PHOTO: Tower Bridge is seen stuck in the raised position as people walk along the south bank in London, England. © Peter Summers / Getty Images
Major cities in the UK may risk facing a similar epidemic of synthetic opioid deaths as in the US, a top police chief told the Telegraph on Wednesday. The epidemic of drug overdoses in San Francisco presented a stark warning of what the UK may face as a result of global changes in the illegal narcotics market, Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) Donna Jones told the news outlet.
Jones said it was “inevitable” that British cities would face a similar spike in deaths, following the Taliban’s banning of poppy farming last year, and the resulting 90 percent fall in heroin export from Afghanistan.
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“That will completely dry up the heroin supply down to Africa and up through Europe over the next 12 months,” she said, explaining this means the “synthetic opioid market is going to explode.”
“It’s already happening in America, and heroin addicts in America are dying in their plenty because synthetic opioids like fentanyl are literally 50 times stronger than street heroin,” Jones added.
Deaths registered from drug poisoning in England and Wales are at their highest recorded numbers, according to Tuesday’s figures from the Office for National Statistics. Opiates made up just under half of the 4,907 drug-related deaths in the last year.
Some 54 deaths in the last six months have been linked to the super-strength synthetic opioid nitazene, according to the National Crime Agency. These can be 300 times more powerful than heroin and six times as potent as fentanyl, The Telegraph writes.
First reportedly detected in the UK in April 2021, they have been found in numerous other illegal drugs, as well as being sold as the anti-anxiety benzodiazepine pill Diazepam.
A police raid on a drugs factory in northeast London in October seized a record number of approximately 150,000 tablets of nitazene and led to the arrest of 11 people. While first developed as a painkiller in the 1950s, nitazenes have never been licensed due to their strength and addictive properties. Jones warned that addicts using a cocktail of heroin and other drugs were extremely vulnerable to accidental overdoses by underestimating the potency of synthetic opioids.
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The US had almost 80,000 reported opioid-involved drug overdose deaths last year. So far this year, 752 people have died from drug overdoses in San Francisco alone, with more than 80% of those cases believed to have involved fentanyl. Back in 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the drug-ravaged Tenderloin neighborhood to allow the city “to waive certain laws to quickly address the crisis of people dying of drug overdoses on the streets.” The City is currently engaged in an operation to shut down its notorious open-air drug markets.
