FROM THE PASTOR’S HEART
OP / ED BY DR. ADIL MANZOOR
You know heroin, right?
If you are older than 11, your answer is almost certainly going to be yes. Even if you aren’t too knowledgeable about heroin, you will agree with me that it is dreaded pretty much everywhere in the world. At the height of heroin abuse in the United States – I’m talking 2017 – well over 15,000 people died a year from heroin overdose. Those are nasty numbers, but we are not here to talk about heroin, are we? So, what’s the point of all of this short poem about heroin?
Well, fentanyl – the topic of today’s discussion – is 50 times more powerful than heroin. Yes, you read that correctly. And that’s somehow not the most shocking statistic I have written in this article. Seriously, consider this: if you have heard of heroin, chances are that you have heard of morphine, another powerful opioid drug that is commonly abused; it may interest you to know that fentanyl is a staggering 100 times more powerful than morphine. Hundred!
Again, the point of this article is not morphine. Rather, I am providing a much-needed background of just how dangerous fentanyl is for you to understand the gravity of what I am about to say next. Here it goes – do you know that doses of fentanyl sell for as little as $2 in some U.S. cities? Not to be overdramatic, but can you believe that a drug that is 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine sells for a meager two dollars?!
Now, to the point of the article; sorry to keep you waiting. There is a fentanyl problem in the United States. Fentanyl, its analogs, and other drugs in its class accounted for more than 67,000 preventable deaths in 2021. However you view it, that’s a public health problem.
The reason fentanyl is marketed so cheap is that it is synthetically produced and not derived from plants, like heroin and cocaine. The implication is that it is easier to produce, and by implication, a lot can be produced and moved across country borders.
The government has recognized the fentanyl crisis for a long time now but has failed to act swiftly. The Biden administration is trying to speed up the fight against the trafficking and illicit use of fentanyl in the United States now, though, and set up an initiative in March directed against fentanyl traffickers. In two months, close to 10,000 pounds of the drug were seized. You may be thinking, “That’s good news, right?” Actually, not quite. Let me explain.
If government operations can easily seize that amount of fentanyl in two months, it indicates that there is a surplus of the drug in actual circulation. And I know I’m right because the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports that 379 million deadly doses of fentanyl were seized in 2022. That’s enough doses to kill every human being in the United States, and still have enough to wipe out all of Ukraine’s population.
If it wasn’t clear before, it is now – the United States needs to get on top of this fentanyl trafficking and abuse crisis before it becomes worse than it already is, which is a scary sight to imagine.
As I was saying, the Biden administration wants to pick up the pace of the fight against the fentanyl crisis. It intends to do this by ramping up arrests of fentanyl traffickers and illegal sellers, as well as seizing as many thousand pounds as the DEA possibly can. Also, there are plans in place to tighten security at the borders, which is possibly the single most significant way fentanyl makes it into the streets of the United States’ big cities.
I don’t want to bore you with the technicalities of the technology but it will be state-of-the-art scanners that can detect fentanyl much faster than physical inspection by agents. If everything goes to plan, by 2026, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will be able to scan 40% of passenger cars and 70% of cargo vehicles, a massive upgrade on the current 2% of passenger vehicles and 17% of cargo vehicles that enter the US.
We can only hope, for the sake of us all, that this crisis is averted. And very soon.
This article was written by Dr. Adil Manzoor, DO, a Board-Certified Internist & Board Certified Pediatrician who works as a Hospitalist and Emergency Room Physician. He is also the current President of Garden State Street Medicine, a non-profit organization whose sole purpose is to provide free preventive and acute urgent care services for the homeless. He is also the co-founder of his own unique medical practice, Mobile Medicine NJ & House call Doctors. He is also currently pursuing an Executive MBA and a Master’s of Science in Healthcare Leadership at Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
References
- https://www.newsweek.com/biden-admin-expands-border-inspections-tech-curb-fentanyl-trafficking-1809268
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/22/fentanyl-trafficking-dhs/
- https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/drugoverdoses/data-details/
- https://www.pinelandsrecovery.com/what-is-the-difference-between-fentanyl-and-heroin/
