New Opioids, Ten Times Stronger Than Fentanyl, Now Linked To Overdose Surge
Synthetic opioids, manufactured in China, are spreading across this nation.
Drug enforcement officials are now warning about a new group of opioids, ten times stronger than fentanyl, which has been linked to a recent surge in overdoses.
“Laboratory test results indicate that the potency of certain nitazene analogs [e.g., isotonitazene, protonitazene, and etonitazene] greatly exceeds that of fentanyl, whereas the potency of the analog metonitazene is similar to fentanyl,” explained a team of researchers from the Tennessee Department of Health.
Deaths linked to drugs are on the rise. In their report issued Friday, Jessica Korona-Bailey and colleagues said that “four times as many nitazene-involved overdoses were identified in Tennessee in 2021 than in 2020, and this number could be underestimated because of low testing frequency.”
Overall, deaths in Tennessee known to be linked to the synthetic opioids rose from 10 in 2020 to 42 one year later, with a majority of those killed being young males (average age 40).
Tennessee’s State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS) identified the nitazene-related fatal drug overdoses in 2021. There are urgent warnings being issued, as nitazines are so much more potent than fentanyl, that emergency treatment options are being impacted.
Naloxone, a medication used to reverse the effects of opioids sold under the brand name Narcan, among others, has been effective in countering nitazene-related overdoses, the study said.
However, multiple doses may be needed because of the potency of nitazenes, researchers pointed out.
“Given their potency, raising awareness about nitazenes and implementing strategies to reduce harm through increased testing, surveillance and linkage to treatment for substance use disorders are of vital importance,” they wrote.
The use of nitazenes is spreading. Legal Insurrection readers will not be surprised to learn these compounds are being manufactured in China for distribution in this country.
The growing danger of nitazene-tainted opioids in illicit drug supply isn’t specific to Tennessee, of course.
In June, the Washington, D.C.-based branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency issued an alert on the same class of drugs being spotted in that area.
“A drug that was never approved for medical use, nitazenes are being sourced from China and being mixed into other drugs,” the DEA explained in a statement.
One nitazene, isotonatazene (nicknamed ISO), was especially prevalent in the D.C. area.
“First identified around 2019 in the Midwest, this dangerous drug has moved into the Southern states and, more recently, along the Eastern seaboard,” the agency explained.
At this, anyone who uses opioids that aren’t via a doctor’s prescription from a reputable pharmacy has a death wish that China will be all too happy to grant.
As a reminder, the potential lethal dose of fentanyl is two milligrams.
Pascoe, 23, of Pittsburg, California, pleaded guilty on February 14, 2022, to the charge of distributing fentanyl. In his plea agreement, Pascoe admitted that on the night of June 16, 2020, a former high school classmate came to his house to buy oxycodone pills. He sold her thirteen M30 pills, which lab tests later showed were laced with deadly fentanyl. The next morning the victim was found dead in her bed, and the baggie containing the M30s that Pascoe sold to the victim was found in her bedroom. Pascoe agreed in his plea agreement that the victim ingested the M30s he sold her and as a result suffered an overdose of fentanyl.
The government filed a sentencing memorandum asserting that while Pascoe did not intentionally cause his high school classmate’s death, her death was the product of Pascoe’s reckless disregard for her safety. Pascoe told the victim he would buy the oxycodone pills from a street source he referred to as his “other connect.” The government pointed out that dealing in M30 oxycodone pills bought on the street is extremely dangerous. According to DEA, counterfeit M30 pills routinely contain fentanyl, and four out of every ten such pills contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl. A lethal dose can be miniscule, as little as two milligrams. Pascoe essentially “played Russian roulette,” the government asserted, but it was the victim who suffered the fatal consequences of Pascoe’s reckless, grossly negligent conduct.
Given that nitazenes are ten times more potent, I would estimate the lethal does to be 0.2 milligrams. Therefore, the number of drug deaths will continue to rise, as our border leaks and there is no coherent plan to stem the flow of synthetic opioids from China.
According to the latest national data, U.S. drug overdoses hit a record high in 2021 — more than 108,000 lives lost. Three-quarters of those deaths involved synthetic opioids such as fentanyl or nitazenes.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
How does it benefit illegal drug dealers or cartels, to have their customers dying in such notable numbers? Why aren’t they “cutting” the potentially deadly chemicals to lower concentrations that might ensure repeat business and a lack of notice from law enforcement?
To put is another way: who benefits from illegal drug users dying?
Law enforcement
I should explain. The primary mandate of any agency is to expand its power and scope. Covid is winding down.
You don’t increase your power by solving problems. You increase your power by making them worse
But in cities where addicts are dying in record numbers, police are being defunded and the number of active officers has reduced. Those police departments, at least, don’t appear to be benefitting from the rise in drug related deaths.
What better way to show the community that they are necessary and need more funding?
I don’t know… law enforcement and the courts hadn’t solved the illegal drug problems before the number of officers reduced, and they still aren’t. They appear to be mostly useless in “the war on drugs” within Democrat controlled cities where the issues are most evident. I don’t think that the “leadership” of those cities actually want the drug crisis resolved — they are getting billions of dollars to fix the problem that is never actually fixed at all. They don’t want the problem fixed, so why would they want the illegal drug users dying in huge numbers.
I think that I am missing something insofar as I can’t identify any group that benefits from addicts overdosing on illegal drugs — except perhaps pharma, if the illegal drug users could procure safer legal alternatives.
It’s all part of the WEF plan to sharply reduce the global population, beginning with the US. Absolutely everything governments are doing today makes us stupid, weakens us, makes us sick or kills us. Just look at the list of food additives for everything you eat. Then add the seed oils, the many forms of corn syrup, sugar-coated sugar, the FDA food pyramid that was designed by the food industries’ designing your diet needs to correspond with their profit needs. That’s why those two pie charts seem to be connected at the hip.
Crime has become a government subsidized activity, policy are being defunded, law enforcement that assumes innocent until proven guilty (police, FBI, border police, etc…) is being replaced by new armed IRS agents who assume that you are guilty until you prove your innocence with a rigged due process that protects the government and not you.
Transexuals are now a separate class of citizens with special rights, Children are now fair game for sexual predation by adults.
Prisons are being emptied into neighborhoods already beset with crime. Even the worst crimes are being redefined to protect the guilty while Soros DAs refuse to prosecute and with governors doing nothing about it.
Homeless dying is huge numbers as local governments spend hundreds of thousands (over a billion in LA) to turn into an industry to exploit for political advantage.
Post-natal abortion as a universal human right. Women being erased as a species as men are being drugged to control their “toxic masculinity”. Sperm counts are down, life expectancies are crashing. Yes, crashing. More and more women are finding themselves infertile. Do I need to go on?
We are being systematically killed off. There is no arguing otherwise. It is by design. Our government and elites hate us and have been setting us up for elimination. It’s happening.
Sure seems to be a bunch of paranoia with the Biden administration.
Wonder why?
Big mystery. Who knows?
“As a reminder, the potential lethal dose of fentanyl is two milligrams.”
****
Two milligrams is a lot of Fentanyl considering the standard dose for pain relief is 0.o5-0.1 milligrams
And presumably the fentanyl has a cost to the drug dealers, so why aren’t they “cutting” the amount to less-lethal levels?
Because they are coming in pill form already , erroneously stamped as a pharmaceutical to make peole believe they are made by reputable drug companies
That does appear to be the case, but why would a drug dealer want to sell pills that will kill their customer base? If the dealers being tricked into selling more deadly pills, why does it appear that they continue doing it after the first round of deaths among their users?
Drug dealers aren’t the best chemists. They make stupid mistakes when working with something so potent.
Also, the cost of fentanyl is cheaper than the cost of heroin despite being more lethal.
I’ve read, (not being a drug dealer myself,) that drug dealers consider people dying of overdose from too powerful drugs good advertising for their wares.
Relatively speaking you are correct….BUT when you farm opium and smuggle processed fentanyl in large quantities, that minuscule amount of weight could easily be a trace contaminant that could even be on the tip of your finger without you knowing.
If we are going to do the conspiracy theory thing – I’d say it is part of a multi-pronged effort to both reduce the population and simultaneously destabilize society. In the background, politicians are step-by-step eroding our rights and our resistance to having those rights curtailed (new normal), stirring up conflicts to further destabilize societies, corporations (that own our politicians) are buying up our resources – arable land, housing, water, etc – in the end the average person won’t have what they need to be self-sufficient and will be at the mercy of whomsoever runs things in their part of the world.
How does killing-off most or even all drug addicts destabilize society? I would think that it would have the exact opposite effect.
You are completely missing the point. Everything the government is doing right now is destabilizing society. Their aim is to kill us. Destabilizing creates chaos. Do I really have to explain this to you?
How would killing all the illegal drug users by lethal overdose destabilize America?
You are obsessed with a point that is making you miss THE point!
Having more drug users would destabilize society. I truly do not see how killing off people who seek drugs over all other fulfillment in life makes society worse.
I also have never understand the “they’re trying to kill us” argument. What is the optimal population?
According to many environmentalists, the earth can only sustain between 500 million to 2 billion people. So how best to pare down the excess billions, in a kindly way?
There are about 150 million births in the world every year.
There are about 60 million deaths in the world every year.
You would need to kill 90 million a year just to break even.
Getting things down to 2 billion? Yeah good luck with that, and then good luck suppressing those 2 billion. As horrific as it is in China, you can’t even completely suppress 1.4 billion there. The one-child policy lasted exactly one generation.
Forgive me for thinking this theory is just bonkers.
Look at the speeches WEF officers themselves make. Follow what Bill Gates obsesses with. These people are Malthusians who preach global population reduction as their core thesis. When the Malthusians started in the late 1890s, they claimed the planet cannot handle more than 600 million people. I don’t know what the current number is but I never see numbers above 1 billion.
As to drug users, the Malthusians make sure that these drugs are not only widely available for cheap but traces of fentanyl are reportedly being found in our food supply. A lot of children are dying unnecessarily just because they do what children always do. It was never ever this fatal to make a mistake.
I’ve never understood the argument that justifies murder because the murderers are only killing each other off. Or in the case of drugs, they are getting what they deserve. When has that ever worked? It’s phony math.
We need to secure the border ASAP and start executing those producing, supplying and delivering those drugs. We really need to stop pampering criminals and those executed have a zero percent recidivism rate. There is a reason why China fought against us, England and others over the opium trade that was destroying them. Remember that when you think about the Yankee Clipper ships. They were opium runners. Just like Joe Kennedy’s cigarette speed boats were rum runners during prohibition.
“What is the optimal population?”
Just enough to staff the Downstairs for all the Upstairses.
PP – Yes, the elite want to rule over us far more than they do. I just don’t understand how killing billions of people is going to get them there, nor is it practical. I really don’t. How do you kill billions without anyone noticing? Or fighting back? If you cut the population by 1 billion, that’s not enough. 2 billion? 3 billion?
What if someone invents a coronavirus as deadly as this new nitazene opioid? Explain how that wouldn’t backfire on the elite leadership themselves? How do they avoid succumbing to it? How do you control a world population, say, obliterated by 50% or 75%, when the goods and services for the entire planet are wiped out? Look what covid policy did to the world supply chain. If it was that bad for that, how does the planet even function after a terrestrial holocaust? I would argue that it can’t. You’d have survivalists who would never yield, the world would be destroyed beyond recognition, elites would be controlling…..what?
The assumption that human beings have no more potential than slaughtered sheep isn’t a correct one. Yes, there has been horrific slaughter of human beings over the centuries. But there is more fight in the species than not. If this was not true, the population now wouldn’t be the highest its ever been on earth.
I see so many holes in this theory, I could go on and on but I won’t.
Beat you to it by seconds. Good job!
China plays the long game. This is their revenge for The Opium Wars, and their intent is to hollow out our fighting age youth. And while they’re doing that with the drugs, they’re brainwashing our younger kids with their insidious social app. In China, Tik Tok encourages kids to learn math and science. In the US, Tik Tok encourages Billy to cut his pee pee off and call himself Nancy.
It won’t be a long game if they keep killing drug addicts in record numbers. Eventually there won’t be any left. How does China benefit from that?
Read my post again. They’re hollowing out (eg. killing) our fighting age young men in vast numbers. Do I really need to explain to you how that benefits China?
”
“China plays the long game. This is their revenge for The Opium Wars,”
******
Just logged on the make same comment…..Chinese have very long cultural memory and the severe damage that Opium had on Chinese society. By the 1830s, the British were shipping more than 1200 tons of Opium to China per year.
Our new Venezuelan citizens:
https://www.breitbart.com/border/2022/09/18/exclusive-venezuela-empties-prisons-sends-violent-criminals-to-u-s-says-dhs-report/
Good job DHS!!! Our government is turning the country into one big hard-core criminal sanctuary. As if we don’t have enough of our own, we have to import them too! And how may Afghani refugees are actually terrorist infiltrators now on welfare?
All of this is modern “sack cloth and ashes” to punish the USA for all the bad things it has done… that is the position of the Left.
As for China….the goal has been to become internally self-sufficient and the rest of the world reduced to preventing it by “icing on the cake” exploitation. So… the global market place for China goes away… big deal… the world is theirs forever.
My impressions (read somewhere) that artificial sweeteners are mostly corn starch to fill out the volume, the sweetener itself being so sweet that it would be invisible. The same trick would work with opioids.
Good. I hope all degenerate druggies die.
“a new group of opioids, ten times stronger than fentanyl”
Jeebus. Who’s writing this narrative, E. E. Smith?
Progress.
Playing around with these newer drugs is like playing Russian Roulette with 5 of the 6 chambers loaded! That southern border needs to be secured if we’re going to have a chance at getting this problem under control. Which likely means 2 more years at least before it can happen.
Leslie, a serious question. Lithium is a known psychoactive drug. What are the long term effects of lithium exposure in the environment? It seems to me that we are about to experience a lot of lithium added to the environment as we rush to EVs, solar, etc. It is not possible to prevent a lot of the batteries from winding up in land fills, etc. Is anyone preparing for this, and what are the health risks?