Wales is facing a US-style opioid crisis

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Kara Kennedy has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In Europe at the end of the Noughties, the problem drug was krokodil. The semi-synthetic, necrosis-causing alternative to heroin was cheap. My father favoured it so much before his death that he started importing it from eastern Europe into Wales. Across the pond right now, the problem drug is fentanyl, which has made its way into much of the US drug supply. Indeed, it’s become so synonymous with death that many casual users have given up the bag all together (‘I love a line, but I’m not going to die for it,’ one Manhattanite told me recently). More than 75,000 Americans died from synthetic opioids in 2022. And now the opioids crisis has arrived in Wales.

When I asked friends back home in south Wales whether stories about the new influx of synthetics were just something the papers were using to fill their pages, people told me that no, it’s real – and noticeable.