https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-fentanyl-crisis-11672426568
The Fentanyl Crisis
Key findings from The Wall Street Journal’s coverage
1. Mexican cartels have built supply lines and clandestine factories to pump more illicit fentanyl into the U.S. than ever.
From porches and shacks within their remote strongholds, Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels maintain a network of laboratories to make fentanyl, which is killing more Americans than ever. They import chemicals from China to mix in the labs for export across the porous U.S. border.
How Two Mexican Drug Cartels Came to Dominate America’s Fentanyl Supply
2. Fentanyl is killing longtime users and novices alike because of its extreme potency.
To understand the threat fentanyl poses, look how the epidemic has progressed in Columbus, Ohio. Years ago, the city was a hotbed of prescription-painkiller abuse. After officials cracked down on pill mills, some users switched to heroin. Over the years, some overdosed and died. Now fentanyl has supplanted heroin. Longtime users and newcomers alike face a greater threat of dying every time they use the drug, including from accidental encounters when it is laced into other illegal substances.
Fentanyl’s Ubiquity Inflames America’s Drug Crisis
3. Deadly encounters are climbing among users of most illicit drugs, including cocaine.
Recreational users of drugs, including cocaine, are at heightened danger of a deadly run-in with fentanyl. Some batches of fentanyl-laced cocaine have killed multiple people within hours of each other.
Three New Yorkers Ordered Cocaine From the Same Delivery Service. All Died From Fentanyl.
4. More people are dying with a combination of methamphetamine and fentanyl in their system, often after mixing use of the drugs intentionally.
Meth is a powerful and addictive but generally less-deadly substance that imparts energy and euphoria to users. Some are mixing it with fentanyl for a balancing effect. That can be destabilizing for users with entrenched habits and mental-health problems. Deaths among people with both drugs in their system are surging faster than fentanyl-related deaths alone.
How Meth Worsened the Fentanyl Crisis. ‘We Are in a Different World.’
5. Meth and fentanyl-related deaths, once concentrated on opposite sides of the U.S., have exploded into a nationwide crisis.
A series of charts show how fentanyl has driven the more than 400% increase in overdose deaths in the U.S. in the past two decades, reaching into every corner and demographic group in the country. Maps show how fentanyl use was once more common in the Eastern U.S. and meth was more prevalent in the West. Now, the two powerful drugs have overlapped and mixed, regionally and also in the habits of many users. The interplay is one reason deaths have shot to new records.
—Maps by Max Rust
The Tragic Rise of Fentanyl, Mapped
6. Addiction to drugs can be all-encompassing. But some people do escape their grip.
Lauren St. Pierre’s rapid descent into addiction, mainly to meth, landed her in prison with convicted killers. She committed to treatment, was released and rebuilt her life. She has been sober for nearly a decade, a rare escapee from addiction’s clutches.
A Military Wife’s Descent Into Meth Addiction—And Her Agonizing Journey Back
7. Prisons and jails are mounting a real-time experiment in treating users with medication.
Lasting progress against an epidemic of addiction and drug deaths has been rare. A promising new attempt is under way inside prisons and jails, where most people enter addicted to drugs or alcohol, data show. Now, many prisons and jails are treating inmates with medications to tamp their cravings for opioids. People who have continued treatment after release say the programs are the best chance they have had at staying off drugs.
Can Drugs Treat Addiction? Prisons Offer an Answer
8. Tense relations between Washington and Beijing hurt efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl ingredients from China.
Cartels in Mexico buy the building blocks for illicit fentanyl from an array of opaque suppliers in China. A few years ago, Chinese officials answered U.S. requests to more tightly control the production and sale of some of the most common fentanyl ingredients. More recently, China and the U.S. have halted talks on the drug trade. The result is an unimpeded flow of fentanyl ingredients, stoking the record wave of overdose deaths.
Sour U.S.-China Relations Feed the Fentanyl Crisis
9. The fentanyl crisis is killing the most vulnerable victims: small children.
Fentanyl-related deaths among infants and toddlers are on the rise, federal mortality data show. Their small size makes them particularly vulnerable to a potent drug that can easily kill full-grown adults. For many parents using fentanyl who leave the drug within reach of infants and toddlers, losing a child has become a devastating consequence of their addiction.
The Youngest Victims of the Fentanyl Crisis
Write to Jon Kamp at jon.kamp@wsj.com
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