A Modernized Drug Crisis Goes Unchecked

By Roger Chriss, PNN Columnist

The overdose crisis just keeps getting worse. According to the CDC, the U.S. saw over 96,000 overdose deaths in the year ending in March, 2021. The numbers are expected to rise further, with 2021 likely to see over 100,000 drug deaths.

The main driver is illicit fentanyl, which now accounts for over 70,000 drug-involved deaths. Illicit fentanyl is separate from pharmaceutical fentanyl. It is manufactured, distributed, and sold illegally in ever increasing quantities. Vice recently reported that Mexican authorities confiscated 1,225 kilos of fentanyl through September 2021. That’s compared with a total of 1,523 kilos seized over the past two years combined.

There is simply no way to understate the impacts of illicit fentanyl. If current trends persist, deaths from illicit fentanyl will likely exceed alcohol-related deaths within a couple of years, which by recent CDC estimates represents about 95,000 fatalities.

This means that for the first time in history, a synthetic drug will kill more people than “natural” substances do. Throughout the 20th century, tobacco and alcohol were the biggest public health scourges. By comparison, all other drugs combined didn’t kill as many people as alcohol, which only killed a fraction of the people that tobacco did.

That is changing fast. Modernized drugs and illicit markets for them pose unprecedented risks. It is fashionable to talk about the three waves of the overdose crisis or to blame Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family for igniting the opioid epidemic, but the rise of fentanyl and the associated spike in overdose fatalities illustrates a fundamental shift. Designing, manufacturing and distributing drugs has never been easier or more lucrative.

“We live in a world where creative chemists can rapidly design new psychoactive substances when others become hard to get and where the internet can make them almost immediately available around the world,” Maia Szalavitz notes in her recent book “Undoing Drugs.”

Such substances include brorphine and isotonitazene, which have never even been formally tested in humans and have unknown risks and harms. Novel synthetic cannabinoids, opioids and hallucinogens are popping up every month, according to the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education.

Drug fatalities increasingly involve multiple substances, often with incidental exposure via tainted products.

“Most of fentanyl overdoses are in combination with other drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine," NIDA director Nora Volkow told USA Today. "It is all over the place from the East Coast, West Coast and the center of the United States."

The country is ill-prepared and unequipped for a modernized drug crisis. Risks and harms cannot be properly quantified using existing techniques. Deaths cannot even be properly coded on death certificates because the International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes used by the CDC do not distinguish between prescribed opioids and illicit ones.

“The result is a system that obscures the actual cause of most drug overdose deaths and, instead, just tallies the number of times each drug is mentioned in an overdose situation,” researchers recently reported in the journal Cureus. “We examined the CDC's methodology for coding other controlled substances according to the ICD and found that, besides fentanyl, the ICD does not distinguish between other licit and illicitly manufactured controlled substances. Moreover, we discovered that the CDC codes all methadone-related deaths as resulting from the prescribed form of the drug.”

Further, non-fatal risks and harms are rising. Modernized methamphetamine, called “P2P meth” in reference to the chemicals involved in its manufacture, poses novel long-term neuropsychiatric risks to users.

“The spread of P2P meth is part of a larger narrative—a shift in drug supply from plant-based drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin to synthetic drugs, which can be made anywhere, quickly, cheaply, and year-round. Underground chemists are continually seeking to develop more potent and addictive varieties of them. The use of mind-altering substances by humans is age-old, but we have entered a new era,” Sam Quinones, author of the book “Dreamland” about the opioid crisis, writes in The Atlantic.

The impacts of this modernized drug crisis are just starting to be felt and there are no easy options for addressing it. As the RAND Corporation noted in a 2019 report on fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, “resolution of this crisis might require approaches or technologies that do not exist today.”

Roger Chriss lives with Ehlers Danlos syndrome and is a proud member of the Ehlers-Danlos Society. Roger is a technical consultant in Washington state, where he specializes in mathematics and research.