The US opioid crisis has come to Britain

00:00 06:09

Mary Wakefield has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘Never do drugs, you’ll be hooked instantly,’ my mother used to say, and though I nodded, I never even considered paying attention. So I don’t expect my young cousins or my godchildren or my pill-popping friends to take a blind bit of notice when I tell them the same, but I mean it: don’t do drugs. It’s not worth it. Not any more.

One of the reasons not to do drugs back in the day was: ‘You never know what you’re taking.’ The trouble now is not so much that you don’t know, but that you do. The way things are going, pretty soon most street drugs will be made of the same synthetic Chinese-made poison, and it’s lethal. Look online at the videos of zombie-addicts in San Francisco twitching and lolling in the streets, and look at the stats. The figures for American overdoses last year are astonishing: 111,355 dead, up several thousand year on year; and a good three-quarters of these deaths are the result of fentanyl, America’s synthetic opioid of choice – cooked up in Chinese labs, delivered via Mexico’s cartels, 100 times stronger than heroin.

Fentanyl is so horribly potent that young children quite often die from just the fumes or the residue. What it does to poor unborn babies makes fetal alcohol syndrome look benign. And now it’s here, this toxic junk, in the British drug supply, though we were told repeatedly that it could never happen. I mean: I was told and I chose to believe it.