Summary
Since 2000, more than a million people in the United States have died of drug overdoses, the majority of which were due to opioids.
Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids have been driving the crisis in recent years, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating the public’s abuse of the drug.
The crisis has also become a major U.S. foreign policy issue, with most supply coming from China and Mexico.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemic#:~:text=China%2...What is the scale of the epidemic?
Overdoses involving synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, are the leading cause of U.S. deaths in people ages eighteen to forty-five. In 2021, the overall death toll surged to 80,411, more than ten times the number of U.S. military service members killed in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and Yale University found that deaths from fentanyl alone nearly tripled from 2016 to 2021.
Where are the heroin and fentanyl coming from?
Most fentanyl in the United States is smuggled across the border with Mexico, U.S. officials say. Smugglers send it across in vehicles or with pedestrians, who can travel with small, easily concealable amounts of the drugs because of its high potency compared to other illicit narcotics. The median weight seized is just 1.2 kilograms (2.6 pounds), which contains more than fifty thousand lethal doses. By December 2023, at least 12,245 kilograms (27,000 pounds) had been intercepted at the southern U.S. border this year.
China was the dominant source of fentanyl coming into the United States, but the flow has significantly decreased since authorities banned production of all fentanyl variants in 2019. However, China is still the leading manufacturer of fentanyl ingredients, known as precursor chemicals. Most of the fentanyl smuggled into the United States from Mexico is made from chemicals from China.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemic#chapter-title-0...But to stupid mongs like turdy gweggy and arse sniffer wee paki, it is, like everything else in their shrivelled, moronic lives, all about Trump.
****wits.