A top police chief told the Telegraph on Wednesday that major cities in the United Kingdom may face a similar pandemic of synthetic opioid deaths as in the United States. The San Francisco drug overdose pandemic served as a clear warning of what the UK may face as a result of worldwide shifts in the illegal narcotics market, according to Donna Jones, Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC).
Jones predicted that a similar increase in mortality in British cities would be “inevitable” following the Taliban’s ban on poppy planting last year, which resulted in a 90 percent drop in heroin exports from Afghanistan.
“That will completely dry up the heroin supply down to Africa and up through Europe over the next 12 months,” she added. She went on to say that the “synthetic opioid market is going to explode.”
“It’s already happening in America, and heroin addicts in America are dying in their plenty because synthetic opioids like fentanyl are literally 50 times stronger than street heroin,” he said.
According to data released by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday, the number of deaths from drug poisoning in England and Wales has reached an all-time high. Opioids accounted for just under half of the 4,907 drug-related deaths in the previous year.
According to the National Crime Agency, the super-strength synthetic opioid nitazene has been linked to 54 deaths in the last six months. According to The Telegraph, they can be 300 times more potent than heroin and six times more deadly than fentanyl.
They were first discovered in the UK in April 2021, and have since been found in a variety of other illegal narcotics, as well as being sold as the anti-anxiety benzodiazepine medication Diazepam.
In October, police raided a narcotics factory in northeast London, seizing a record haul of about 150,000 nitazene tablets and arresting 11 people. Despite being developed as a pain reliever in the 1950s, nitazenes have never been licenced due to their potency and addictive nature.
