More than 500,000 people have died by overdose in twenty years in the United States. More specifically, by overdose caused by taking opiates. The country is facing a real health crisis, an epidemic, which is increasingly affecting young people and minorities. These synthetic drugs are thus responsible for the death of 493 American teenagers in 2019, and 1,146 in 2021. In total, the country recorded a record number of deaths last year, with some 107,000 deaths by overdose.

At the origin of the crisis, pharmaceutical companies, in particular Purdue, which has developed powerful painkillers under the name of OxyContin, prescribed in quantity, making patients more and more dependent. “There was irresponsible prescription dispensing for years, but now it’s much more difficult to get them,” he said. 20 minutes Nicole Bacharan, specialist in American society. Today, it is above all another opiate, fentanyl, which is singled out. So how do we explain that the population continues to die from this painkiller drug that is much more difficult to obtain legally?

Prized by cartels

“It’s a drug of choice among young people and in the modest environment, it is extremely addictive”, develops Nicole Bacharan. According to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the overdose death rate among black people increased by 44% between 2019 and 2020. The increase was 39% among Native Americans, and 22% among white people. In total, in 2020, the United States recorded more than 91,000 overdose deaths, the majority linked to synthetic opioids, including fentanyl.

It is also a drug of choice for Mexican drug cartels, which manufacture most illegal fentanyl from Chinese products. A good deal for these criminal groups, because the potency of fentanyl means that a smaller dose is enough to fill a pill. A kilogram of pure product, bought for about 12,000 dollars, is transformed into half a million pills, more easily transportable, which can be worth up to 30 dollars each. Last year, the DEA seized almost seven tons of fentanyl – enough to kill the entire American population. Four out of ten pills contained a lethal dose. This drug is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.

A particularly dangerous drug

Fentanyl is so potent that the difference between living and dying is less than a gram. “It only takes very small amounts for it to become a poison that prevents you from breathing,” Wilson Compton, deputy director of the US National Institute on Drug Addiction, told AFP. “Before, when you were addicted to drugs, you had 5, 10, 15 years to try to overcome the addiction”, abounds Shannon Doyle, mother of a young girl who died of an overdose at 16 years old. “You don’t have that chance anymore. »

To try to stem the problem, the DEA has launched a prevention campaign on the risks of fentanyl, and initiatives are trying to increase the accessibility of naloxone, an antidote that can save a person overdosing. But it could be that the problem is spreading outside the United States.

Can the crisis spread in France?

If the United States is particularly affected, it is because the population has been treated for years with opiates, “people are already conditioned to this drug”, because of the “particularly aggressive methods used to popularize it commented Nicole Bacharan.

In France, 19,500 tablets of this very dreaded opiate were seized in Dax. The previous major seizure of this drug dates back to 2019. Customs officers in Dieppe (Seine-Maritime) then got their hands on 10 kg of fentanyl. However, the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT), considers that “there is currently no risk in France of an opioid crisis comparable to that which is taking place in North America”, with less 10 deaths per year in 2020 on French territory.