A relatively unknown and dangerous opioid is killing hundreds as authorities scramble to warn people about the drug, a new report reveals.
Synthetic opioids known as nitazenes, which are stronger than fentanyl and mostly come from China, have killed hundreds of people in Europe, The Wall Street Journal reports. Just trace amounts of the drug can trigger a fatal overdose.
Street nitazenes can be up to 250 times as potent as heroin, and up to five times as strong as fentanyl, the Journal reports. The opioid has been found mixed into several drugs, including heroin, counterfeit painkillers and anxiety medication, according to the outlet.
Nitazenes are now spreading amid the ongoing opioid crisis in the U.S. While the crisis has affected the entire nation, it has particularly impacted West Virginia and other Appalachian communities. More than 800,000 people died from opioid overdoses in the U.S. between 1999 and 2023, according to the CDC.
“Synthetic opioids in the U.S. have not been driven by demand, they have been driven wholesale by supply,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Journal . “If large criminal groups such as Albanian mafia groups, Turkish criminal groups or Italian or Mexican groups get into supplying nitazenes to Europe on a large scale, we can anticipate a massive public healthcare catastrophe.”
Drug cartels in Mexico could “easily” use their existing contacts in China-based suppliers to bring the opioids into the U.S., the Drug Enforcement Administration warned last year. However, at the time of the report, Mexican authorities had not seized any nitazene or nitazene-fentanyl mixtures in Mexico. Only 12 percent of nitazene exhibits analyzed by the DEA “came from Southwest Border states,” the report said.
U.S. authorities reported last year that they found nitazenes in at least 4,300 drug seizures since 2019, according to the Journal.
Identifying the drug can be difficult, given that many overdose toxicology tests don’t include nitazenes, the Journal reports. As a result, nitazenes are likely much more prevalent than official numbers might suggest, and the current death toll is likely an undercount.
Nitazenes have never been approved for medical use and were first developed in Switzerland in the 1950s as an alternative to morphine, according to a September 2024 report by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission. The commission operates under the Organization of American States, a group of 34 nations that includes the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
The opioids “emerged more widely on the illicit drug market in Europe” in 2019, the commission said. Since then, the drugs have been identified on nearly every continent.
Anne Jacques of North Wales told the Journal her son died of a nitazene overdose in 2023, explaining she felt like he had been “murdered.”
Jacques was initially told that her son, a healthy opera singer, died of cardiac arrest. When police found Xanax tablets in his room and evidence on his phone that he may have purchased the pills illegally, she researched drug contaminants and asked a coroner to test for nitazene.
Seven months after her son’s death, police told Jacques her son’s pills had been contaminated with the opioid, the Journal reports.
“I basically had to investigate my own son’s death,” Jacques said.
Nitazenes could be the “biggest public health crisis for people who use drugs in the U.K. since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,” Vicki Markiewicz, executive director for the drug and alcohol treatment organization Change Grow Live, told the Journal.
