This is indeed defined as a true business niche.
A walking tour of downtown San Francisco, “through fatality and misery”, will allow those interested to discover the referents of “urban decay and the open drug market”.
The promoters of the tour, scheduled for August 26, assure that they have sold all the tickets, at $30, to see the world of the living dead live. This is a real science phenomenon caused for the most part by the plague of fentanyl, a laboratory substance 100 times more powerful than morphine and 50 times more than heroin.
The “theme park” of human self-destruction is not exclusive to the metropolis of the Californian bay, where many have been outraged by this commercialization of destitution. That is something that is happening in any city, like New York, and, despite the tragic balance, it is still growing.
According to the latest data, as of 2022, opioid overdoses kill more than 107,000 Americans annually. 80% is attributed to fentanyl, which causes some 200 deaths a day, more than 70,000 a year. It is already the leading cause of mortality in the sector between 18 and 45 years of age.
This is truly a very American problem, just as the crack problem was. “No country has had the fentanyl problem that we have here,” replies Sam Quinones, a journalist who has spent years investigating this matter, 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. Magic answers to complicated issues that push us to drugs more than any other country, ”she confesses.
“There’s an attitude among us that part of those magical responses come from medicine and pills. It is this idea that we should not feel pain and we ask the doctors that there is no pain ”, he explains.
And that’s how this crisis started, in the mid-nineties. Quinones says that physicians have been “convinced, pressured or pushed” to prescribe opioid pain relievers more than ever before. PurduePharma’s OxyContin, owned by the Sackler family, had hit the market. They provided false information to the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by indicating that its addictive capacity was much lower than the truth. While their pills fooled the aching America and raked in billions, they well-oiled political campaigns and served as benefactors with their philanthropy and contributions to great 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 the damage.
The 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 the ability to flood the territory have never been seen before,” Quinones stresses.
Before, with heroin, they could only have a poppy crop every few months and after intense cultivation. Today they produce fentanyl on a daily basis if they have the ingredients, chemical ingredients that are shipped from China to drug-controlled Mexican ports.
The numbers are illustrative. Although there was already talk of the plague, from 1999 to 2019 there were some 500,000 deaths, at an average of 25,000 per year. Since 2020, due to the effect of fentanyl, that number exceeds 100,000.
“There is a demand creation, not the other way around,” says Quinones. The colored pills are sold at a very cheap price. They know that part of the buyers die, but there are always others who enter. Their products sometimes mimic Percocet or Xanax pills, but the addicts don’t care. “Anyone who buys a $20 Rolex knows it’s fake,” he clarifies.
So the key, he maintains, is to limit that supply and it will only be achieved with the collaboration between the United States and Mexico, which do not seem to be on the same page.
“These pills are being produced en masse in Mexico and it is the deadliest drug we have ever faced,” Anne Milgram, director of the DEA (drug trafficking agency), said in Congress a few days ago. “Fentanyl is cheap to make, easy to swallow, and deadly to consumers. Just two milligrams, the equivalent of a few grains of salt, can kill a person,” she added.
The DEA seized 400 million doses of this product in 2022 – “a sufficient quantity to kill all Americans”, according to Milgram – and in 2023 the sum amounts to more than 200 million.
Quinones speaks of “national poisoning.” That transcends “in the streets of the United States” with those walking dead dominated “by a slaver called fentanyl.”
