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Shkruar nga Pamfleti
Up to 250 times stronger than heroin, the Class A concoction is so potent that it has been dubbed the 'Frankenstein' drug in the past...
A new drug has begun to circulate, perhaps not on a massive scale, but it has alarmed security structures in Europe and beyond. It is nitazene, a single grain of which can be deadly. Experts warn of an approaching public health "catastrophe" precisely from this type of drug, which is mainly imported from China.
Nitazene is estimated to be 250 times stronger than heroin, and the Class A mixture is so potent that it has been called the "Frankenstein" drug in the past.
It is being mixed into painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs, which can be easily purchased online. Drug lords do this to make the drugs stronger or to expand the supply and increase profits.
Just a small amount of this drug can shut down the body's central nervous system and cause an immediate overdose.
Parts of Europe, specifically Britain and the Baltic states, are facing an influx of drug-related deaths.
Hundreds of people died in the UK from overdoses involving nitazene over the past 18 months, according to the government.
“This is probably the biggest public health crisis for people who use drugs in the United Kingdom since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,” Vicki Markiewicz, executive director for Change Grow Live, a leading provider of drug and alcohol treatment in the United Kingdom, told The Wall Street Journal.
Just this week, Scottish health chiefs have warned that nitazoxanide is spreading across Scotland, warning of an imminent wave of deaths.
Synthetic opioids are also driving a significant increase in deaths in Estonia and Latvia.
“ If large criminal groups, such as Albanian mafia groups, Turkish criminal groups or Italian or Mexican groups, start supplying Europe with nitazene on a large scale, we can foresee a massive public health care catastrophe ,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes The Sun.
Drug cartels in Mexico can "easily" use their contacts in China to smuggle nitazene into the US, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has warned.
So far, Mexico has not seized any shipments of the drug, but the DEA says it has already been found in at least 4,300 drug seizures since 2019.
Just identifying the substance is a challenge, as most overdose tests do not test for nitazene, meaning the true number of deaths could be much higher than reported.
Symptoms of an overdose can be reversed by taking an antidote called naloxone. Nitazen first made news in the UK in 2021 when an 18-year-old man suffered a non-fatal overdose.
Since then, the drug has gained popularity, becoming the newest killer on the streets.
Officially, more than 400 deaths, plus many non-fatal overdoses, were linked to nitazoxanide in the UK between June 2023 and January 2025, according to government data.
In Estonia, nitazoxanides were involved in 48 percent of all drug-related deaths in 2023 (56 out of 117), up from 39 percent in 2022, the European Drug Report 2025 says.
In Latvia, deaths linked to nitazene rose from 29 percent in 2022 to 38 out of 130 in 2023 - doubling the total number of drug deaths in the country in just one year, similar data show. /Adapted from Pamphlet/
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