This is indeed defined as a true business niche.
A tourist walking tour through the center of San Francisco, “through fatality and misery”, will allow those interested to discover the references of “urban decay and the open drug market”.
The promoters of the walk, scheduled for August 26, say they have sold all the tickets, at $30, to get to know the world of the living dead live. It is a real science phenomenon caused mostly by the plague of fentanyl, a laboratory substance 100 times more powerful than morphine and 50 times more powerful than heroin.
The “theme park” of human self-destruction is not exclusive to the Californian Bay Area metropolis, where many have been outraged by this commercialization of poverty. This is something that is happening in any city, like New York, and despite the tragic toll, it continues to increase.
According to the latest data, as of 2022, opiate overdoses kill more than 107,000 Americans annually. 80% is attributed to fentanyl, which causes about 200 deaths a day, more than 70,000 a year. It is already the number one reason for mortality in the sector between the ages of 18 and 45.
This is, in truth, a very American problem, as was the crash. “No country has had the fentanyl problem we have here,” answers Sam Quinones, a journalist who has been investigating this matter for years, author of several books and opinion articles in the US media.
“The reason? I would say that as a culture, we look for easy answers. Magical answers to complicated issues that push us to drugs more than any other country”, he confesses.
“There is an attitude among us that some of these magical answers come from medicine and pills. It’s the idea that we shouldn’t feel pain and we demand from the doctors that there is no pain”, he explains.
And so this crisis began, in the mid-nineties. Quinones says that doctors were “convinced, pressured or pushed” to prescribe more opioid painkillers than ever before. OxyContin, from PurduePharma, owned by the Sackler family, had arrived on the market. They provided false information to the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) when they indicated that their addictive capacity was much lower than the real one. While the pills cheated the aching USA and made billions, they greased political campaigns and acted as benefactors with their philanthropy and contributions to major museums.
Today they are repudiated, the tribute plaques have disappeared and the Supreme Court will decide on the judicial agreement reached to pay 6,000 million to compensate for the wrong done.
Contrition came late. In the middle of the last decade, the Mexican drug cartels discovered the vein that had been created. “It’s a big change, because this amount of supply and capacity to flood the territory had never been seen before,” emphasizes Quinones.
Before, with heroin, they could only have a poppy harvest every few months and after intensive cultivation. Today they produce fentanyl daily if they have the ingredients, chemical ingredients that sail from China to the Mexican ports controlled by the narcos.
The numbers are illustrative. Although there was already talk of a plague, from 1999 to 2019 there were around 500,000 deaths, an average of 25,000 a year. Since 2020, due to the effect of fentanyl, the figure exceeds 100,000.
“There is a creation of demand, not the other way around,” says Quinones. The colored tablets are sold at a very cheap price. They know that some of the buyers die, but there are always others who come in. Their products sometimes mimic Percocet or Xanax pills, but addicts don’t care. “Whoever buys a $20 Rolex knows it’s fake,” he explains.
So the key, he maintains, is to limit supply and it will only be achieved with the collaboration between the United States and Mexico, which do not seem to be in tune.
“These pills are being produced en masse in Mexico and it’s the deadliest drug we’ve ever faced,” said Anne Milgram, director of the DEA (drug-trafficking agency), in Congress a few days ago. “Fentanyl is cheap to manufacture, easy to pass and deadly to consumers. Just two milligrams, the equivalent of a few grains of salt, can kill a person,” he added.
The DEA confiscated 400 million doses of this product in 2022 – “Enough to kill all Americans”, according to Milgram – and in 2023 the sum will rise to more than 200 million.
Quinones speaks of “national poisoning”. This transcends “the streets of the United States” with the living dead dominated “by a slaver called fentanyl.”
