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A wave of the potent designer drug fentanyl currently flooding the streets of San Francisco has led experts to conclude that a police seizure of more than 7 kilograms of powdered substance last week could be just a drop of water in the supply bucket.
Fentanyl overdoses killed 1,603 inhabitants of the city in 2019. The keeper reported that city-wide overdose deaths have increased by more than 2,100 percent in five years.
Yet city police chief Bill Scott said last week’s operation captured “enough deadly overdoses to wipe out four times the population of San Francisco.”
“Fentanyl remains the main chemical culprit in the record number of fatal overdoses in our city”, Scott added in Facebook post.
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The substance, which is relatively cheap to manufacture and can be fatal in trace amounts, overlaps heavily with heroin and other powdered substances in areas with high fentanyl concentrations, according to the National Drug Threat Assessment 2020 of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Daniel Ciccarone, Professor of Addiction Medicine at the University of California, said in an article published in June that the acceleration in overdose deaths marks the “fourth wave” of the opioid epidemic.
“Fentanyl deaths are increasing faster in the west than in the east,” Ciccarone said.
Stanford University researcher Chelsea Shover added in a separate article published in The Journal Drug and Alcohol Addiction that the epidemic is following the same paths as the opioid epidemic on the east coast several years ago.
“Given how fentanyl dramatically worsened the overdose death rate in the United States when it was ubiquitous in only part of the country, its national spread could significantly worsen the epidemic,” indicates the report.
While the pandemic may have worsened the city’s outbreak, David Panush, chief of California Health Policy Strategies, told the Guardian that the fentanyl crisis far precedes the global virus outbreak.
“The pandemic probably made it worse, but you’ve had these addictive trends skyrocketing and fentanyl is like pouring gasoline on a fire,” Panush said.
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But even with major wins like last week’s 7-kilogram drop, experts say the supply chain is likely unfazed. Ciccarone said hearing about the busts gives him a “sense of dread”, adding that he sees it as a sign that “the supply has increased”.
“We just did not get a proportional response to what amounts to an uncontrolled crisis,” he added. “There is still not enough niche for drug treatment in America. “
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