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. A colleague of my old next-door neighbour dropped dead; a friend’s cousin had an overdose at Christmas. But it’s not fentanyl they’re worried about. What faces Wales, and perhaps the rest of the UK, is something even deadlier.

Since the Taliban clamped down on opium cultivation two years ago, reducing Afghanistan’s poppy crop by 95 per cent and devastating the European heroin market, a new type of drug has stepped in to fill the gap: nitazenes. A strain of synthetic opioids first developed by pharmaceutical companies in the 1950s but never approved for medicinal use, nitazenes are being shipped across the world from Chinese labs and are ending up in the arms or up the noses of unsuspecting customers. Some strains are 500 times stronger than morphine; all are stronger than heroin, the drug they try to replicate.