A dangerous high
The U.S. is being flooded with synthetic drugs that are cheap to make, hard to track, and fraught with risk
Are synthetic drugs new?
Lab-made or “designer” drugs have been around for decades. LSD is synthetic, and so is methamphetamine. But what’s new is the dizzying scale and variety of synthetic intoxicants and their increasing dominance of the drug market.
Traditionally, most illicit drugs have come from plants that are cultivated on a large scale, such as marijuana, opium and heroin from poppies, and cocaine from coca leaves. But those plant-based drugs are being supplanted—or adulterated—by synthetic stimulants, opioids, and cannabinoids made in clandestine labs that are far cheaper and easier for traffickers to produce and transport. They’re also far deadlier. Some 80,400 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2024, nearly 70% more than a decade earlier; synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl, accounted for nearly 68% of those deaths. Fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, is now giving way to even deadlier compounds such as the 10-times more powerful cychlorphine. In Knoxville, Tenn., a national cychlorphine hot spot, at least 50 overdoses involving the drug have been confirmed in the past six months. “This is the modern drug epidemic,” said Bob DuPont, U.S. drug czar under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “It’s like nothing that’s happened in the world before—anywhere.”
How many synthetic drugs are there?
More than 1,460 new psychoactive substances have been recorded by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime since 2013, tripling in just over a decade. And new compounds are popping up with staggering speed, leaving law enforcement scrambling to keep up. “Once a month or every other month, we’re encountering something that we’ve never seen before,” said Ed Sisco, a research chemist who tracks street drugs for the federal government. One reason traffickers keep inventing new drugs is to stay ahead of the law: the moment a compound is identified and made illegal, narcochemists—sometimes aided by artificial intelligence—tweak its molecular structure to get around the law. “Each time we get rid of one substance,” said forensic scientist Alex Krotulski, “they come up with something more potent.”
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What are these new drugs?
They run the gamut. There are sedatives such as xylazine, street-named Tranq, an animal tranquilizer that can cause fleshrotting skin lesions and is frequently mixed with fentanyl. Last month, the CDC warned about the rise of medetomidine, or “Rhino tranq,” which is up to 200 times more potent and doesn’t respond to conventional overdose-reversal treatments like naloxone. There are hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids, such as K2 and Spice, sold at smoke shops and convenience stores across the U.S.; they can yield a weed-like high and can also cause agitation, delusions, seizures, kidney damage, and, in extreme cases, death. There are cathinones, stimulants modeled on MDMA that “hijack the dopamine system in the brain” and thus are “extremely addictive,” said Michael Baumann of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “There’s a reason why chemists would design these.” Nitazenes are an even bigger category.
What are nitazenes?
Developed as painkillers in the 1950s, this family of synthetic opioids was never approved for clinical use because of its staggering potency. Some nitazenes are so powerful that under 2 milligrams—the equivalent of a few grains of sand—can kill a person by shutting down breathing. Since they surfaced in the U.S. in 2019, the drugs have caused at least 2,000 overdose deaths. The newest worry is a different class of synthetic opioids called orphines, which include cychlorphine. Joe Guy, sheriff in McMinn County, Tennessee, an hour south of Knoxville, notes one issue common among synthetic drugs: wildly varying potency that makes ingestion a crapshoot. “One pill, one hit, can literally end your life,” said Guy. And because traffickers often use cheap new synthetics to boost narcotics such as fentanyl and heroin, or even substitute them for various pills, drug consumers very often don’t even know what they are taking. Authorities in Arkansas last week confirmed the state’s first known cychlorphine death: an unidentified man who took what he thought was an oxycodone pill, which was actually laced with the more powerful orphine. “This is mass-produced deception,” said Ted Brown, head of the Arkansas Crime Laboratory.
Where are these drugs coming from?
The federal government pegs the primary source as Mexican cartels using chemicals sourced from China. Other synthetic drugs come directly from China and sometimes India, and are cut and sold by small domestic operators. Efforts have been made to stem the flow of raw materials, but with unintended consequences. When China tightened controls on chemicals used in fentanyl in 2019, narcochemists researched alternatives and revived production of nitazenes. Last summer, China banned nitazenes—which may have led to the sudden rise of cychlorphine.
Is there a better way to respond?
On the street level, there are calls for wider distribution of naloxone, and for educating young people about the dangers that may lurk inside a pain pill or a bag of synthetic cannabinoids. On the enforcement front, there are moves to increase global cooperation to disrupt supply chains, stem trafficking, and identify emerging threats. To that end, the Biden administration in July 2023 launched the 160-nation Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats; China has not yet joined the group. But some experts emphasize that the era of synthetic drugs underlines the need to address the root factors that make users seek out drugs, given the futility of targeting a supply that’s constantly expanding and shifting. “Today is the most dangerous time in the history of the world to be using drugs,” said Andrew Monte, who runs the Rocky Mountain Poison Center. “That’s until tomorrow, when there’s a new drug.”
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