Estonia is the one country that can say it beat fentanyl. By 2018, its overdose deaths had fallen more than 70 percent after fifteen years of raids, new laws, and dismantled labs. Then something worse arrived. Reporting for The New York Times, in a story carried by the Seattle Times, Azam Ahmed finds a chief organized-crime prosecutor who now says, “We wish we still had a fentanyl problem.”
What replaced fentanyl were nitazenes, synthetic opioids that in some varieties run more than 40 times stronger, and, this year, an even newer drug called cychlorphine that is already killing more people than nitazenes did.
Police caught one supplier with 1.6 kilograms of it — “enough to cause eight million overdoses” — before the drug was even illegal to possess. “It’s changing too quickly,” one researcher said.
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