‘People Will Keep Dying’: Fentanyl Crisis Grips Mexico’s Border Cities Will Grant - BBC News
go to original February 9, 2024

Fentanyl Crisis Is Sweeping Mexico's US Border Cities (BBC News)

The scene which greeted Tijuana's paramedics as they entered 'La Perla' bar in the early hours of the morning was grim.

Two men were unconscious - a heavy-set man sprawled on the floor, his friend slumped in a chair - both clinging to life by a thread.

Once more, the city's emergency services had been called out following a suspected fentanyl overdose - increasingly part of every nightshift, says paramedic Gabriel Valladares.

"It's getting worse. We're seeing more and more, and it's always fentanyl," he says.

The synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and is making the paramedics' job much harder.

"We generally see two or three overdoses a night. But we've had as many as six or seven cases in a single call - probably because they all took the same substance," adds Gabriel.

Some in the team quickly began CPR on the two patients while others prepared doses of Narcan, the most effective drug to reverse a fentanyl overdose.

The two men may not have even known they were taking fentanyl. Because the opioid is cheap and easy to produce and transport, Mexican drug cartels have begun to cut it into recreational drugs like cocaine.

The Mexican border city finds itself in the grip of a full-blown drug epidemic. But the country's president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, has played down the extent of the problem.

"We don't produce fentanyl here. We don't consume fentanyl here," he said last year. Following that controversial claim, he has promised to introduce new legislation to Congress to ban the consumption of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. Those working on Tijuana's frontlines fear that may be too little, too late.

Read the rest at BBC News

Related: Americans, Not Migrants, Are Smuggling Fentanyl Over Mexico’s Northern Border (The Daily Beast)

Related: Reports of Drug Money in Mexican Politics Shake Up Relations With US (The Hill)

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