While fentanyl has ravaged the North American continent for several years, Europe has alerted to the gradual arrival of a drug that would be 40 times more powerful.
Is it the new opium war? Coming from China, fentanyl is responsible for almost 70% of the dead by overdose in the United States, causing 200 dead each day. If this devastating drug is fatally spreading on the North American continent, another drug, 40 times more powerful and also from China, would attack the European continent: Nitazens.
This drug would be responsible for the death of hundreds of people in Europe. Last year, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) added it to its list while France prohibited their production, sale and use.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal specifies that Europe is on the front line in the face of the arrival of this synthetic product on the opioid markets. Great Britain and several Baltic States are particularly concerned: at least 400 people died of overdoses by Nitaznes in 18 months in the United Kingdom, over a period until January 2025.
In Scotland, the population displays the highest overdose mortality rate per capita in Europe: Nitaznes were involved in 150 to 200 drugs related to drugs in the past two years only.
And if Europe has not been struck in the same way and with the same magnitude by the fentanyl wave that spilled in the United States, it remains vulnerable to opioids.
A drug almost impossible to detect
Mainly made in China, Nitaznes are 500 times stronger than those of morphine, and 50 to 250 times more powerful than heroin. Simple traces of the product during a socket can cause overdoses brutally and very quickly, and quickly bring the vital prognosis into play.
The chemical compounds of the Nitaznes were synthesized for the first time in the late 1950s as analgesics, but have never been approved for medical use in Europe because their benefit/risk ratio being too unfavorable, especially due to the deadly respiratory problems they could cause.
Reappeared, according to a press release from the French Association of Addictovigilance Centers, since 2019-2020, these molecules have notably been involved in “clusters of serious poisoning (with respiratory depression and death) in Occitania and on Reunion Island”, where two deaths are directly imputed to them.
Nitaznes also ravage West Africa, where they are one of the main ingredients of the Kush, this synthetic drug behind the deaths of thousands of people, which led Sierra Leone and Liberia to declare the state of emergency.