Rats grown fat on refuse prowl the streets of Birmingham. Mounds of rubbish pile up outside houses. Desperate to avoid blame, the city’s politicians bleat about being held to ransom by a pesky union. ‘Welcome to Brum,’ one resident said as he caught me taking a photo of a bin mountain. Even CNN has a reporter on the ground. On Saturday, she carefully tiptoed around lots of black bags, as if each were a landmine. This is where Peaky Blinders was filmed, she told her American viewers.
Out of shot, a far greater scandal passes unnoticed. While the national press rummages through Birmingham’s bins, the backstreets of England’s second city are afflicted by a hidden opioid crisis. In 2023, the same year as Birmingham’s last bin strike, and the same year its council effectively declared itself bankrupt, the city’s poorer districts saw an influx of nitazenes – new synthetic opioids up to 40 times stronger than fentanyl and up to 500 times stronger than the heroin it is often mixed with. Since then, overdoses have continued to rise.
These synthetic opioids come mainly from China, where factories found themselves unable to export to America thanks to Donald Trump’s anti-fentanyl policies. Instead, China’s underground chemists switched to nitazenes, while their couriers turned their attention to Britain. Unlike the US, we lack an overdose-tracking dashboard, and official statistics are widely considered a significant underestimate. In January, the Home Office quietly revealed that since June 2023 there have been at least 400 nitazenes-related UK deaths. Curiously, it didn’t say where the deaths occurred.
To get around this, Dispatch, a new magazine I edit, sent Freedom of Information requests to every ambulance service in the UK to find out where naloxone – a nasal spray used to reverse an opioid overdose – was administered last year.
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