COVID-19 potentially exacerbated drug use, due to mass depression, constant anxiety, and citizen uncertainty.
Perhaps when we deal with the issue of addictions we imagine poor neighborhoods, delinquency and violence. However, it goes much, much further.
Addictions have potentially increased due to the use of legal drugs, which seemed to be harmless, but were intended to trap and alienate consumers. One such case was opioids, which are commonly prescribed for pain but have become the worst enemy of American society.
Opioids impair the chemical function of the brain that controls breathing and lead to high risks of dependence. Although its use against pain was normally used in dying patients, the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma introduced the drug OxyContin -whose component is the opiate oxycodone- in 1996, advertised as an analgesic suitable for treating daily pain.
According to DEA data, some 76 billion opioids circulated in the United States between 2006 and 2012 alone, which was called the opioid crisis or epidemic.
What do opioids use to be so addictive? Fentanyl. A substance 50 times more powerful than heroin, with a much more intense reinforcing effect. This generates a greater probability of developing addiction and, in turn, death by overdose.
Beyond the borders
Now, the issue of the addiction epidemic that our northern neighbor is experiencing leads us to a reality that is lived daily in the Mexican drug cartels, which seek to produce and ship fentanyl to the United States.
The Secretary of Defense of Mexico, Luis Cresencio Sandoval González, assured that since 2019, fentanyl seizures in Mexico have increased by 500%.
This explains how the drug cartels have found in the substance the new market to monopolize it, with an asset that is much cheaper than cocaine and seek to position it more than marijuana.
This has generated various massacres, settling scores, an increase in criminal groups, among other scourges within our country. We see this daily.
What about the numbers on the use of said drug in the country?
In 2020, the UN warned of an increase in overdoses in heroin users in Mexico, a situation that presumes a relationship with fentalin.
On this, Silvia Cruz Martín del Campo, a researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the Polytechnic Institute of Mexico (CINVESTAV) left a powerful phrase: “Where it is produced, it is consumed.”
For the specialist, Mexico is no longer just a producer and the problem could become a health crisis of apocalyptic levels.
But we will not know the exact data for the next few years. In this 2022, the National Survey of Drug, Alcohol and Tobacco Consumption (Encodat) should have been carried out. However, the federal government decided to cancel it for austerity reasons.
What the government does know is that the increase in drug deaths has exploded. Not only in terms of security, but of citizens who have died from the mixture of drugs that they commonly used, but which are now combined with fentanyl.
