The UK National Crime Agency titled one of its recent reports as follows: “There has never been a time when taking drugs has been so dangerous.” The increased danger that agency alludes to lies in the fact that, more and more often, drug users don’t know what they’re putting into their bodies. Indeed, if in the past uncertainty might have concerned the degree of purity of the substance being taken or what it had been “cut” with (and that was already quite a risk), now in a dark corner of a street but especially on the internet, unwitting buyers actually end up buying one thing for another. And it happens that this “thing” is nitazene, namely an extremely dangerous synthetic opioid. In recent years, across various European countries, not only hardened heroin addicts who can sometimes withstand an unexpected “hit” are increasingly falling victim to this misfortune, but also occasional users, perhaps looking for something softer. They buy a bag of heroin, but also, more “innocently,” an ecstasy pill or even an illegally sourced Xanax and run an extremely high risk of overdosing, because they’re also taking (or only taking) a nitazene.
Unlike morphine and heroin, nitazenes are opioids that must be completely synthesized in a laboratory starting from chemical substances called “precursors,” specifically 2-benzyl-benzimidazole. And if another notorious synthetic opioid, fentanyl, is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin, according to a table published by The Lancet, some nitazenes (as is the case with etonitazene) can be up to 500 times stronger than heroin.
And now there are fears that an “epidemic” of nitazenes worse than that caused in North America by fentanyl could spread across the Old Continent, which is already the leading cause of death in the 18-49 age group and in 2023 alone killed 72,000 of the 105,000 Americans (and 6,300 of the 8,500 Canadians) who died from overdoses. Despite warnings about the possible spread of this substance in Europe too, on this side of the Atlantic we’ve continued to see fentanyl (as well as methamphetamine) more in TV series than on the streets: throughout the EU in 2023, “only” 153 deaths were attributed to this opioid.
The lack of fentanyl spread in Europe can be attributed to various factors. For years in the United States, many doctors were liberal (euphemism: see the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Golden Lion winner at Venice in 2022) in prescribing opioid-based painkillers that unexpectedly transformed tens of thousands of patients into street addicts. Other North America-specific elements contributed to this: weaker family networks than in Europe, little free healthcare, a greater risk of losing one’s home and ending up on the streets, fewer harm reduction policies.
Nitazenes, however, even though they have been identified in various parts of the world (for example, they are the basis of kush, a synthetic drug that kills thousands in Liberia and Sierra Leone), seem to be, in perspective, a risk especially for Europe. It’s estimated that these new synthetic substances in the UK alone, which is the most affected country, have killed at least 400 people between June 2023 and the end of 2024. British consumers take nitazenes mostly unknowingly, also because the presence of these substances in other drugs is often the result of involuntary contamination that occurred in production laboratories.
Annual reports from the EU drugs agency (EUDA) say that from 2019 to today, nitazenes have also been identified in 21 of the Twenty-seven countries and that the 430 pills containing nitazenes seized in 8 EU countries in 2022 became 24,000 in 2023 and (according to preliminary data) more than 50,000 in 2024. Moreover, in recent years there have been peaks in deaths attributable to nitazenes in Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway. Fortunately, these have been, so far, limited periods and numbers: for example, in Norway 34 deaths were counted in 14 months and in Sweden 30 in 20 months. Many experts think, however, that these estimates are conservative because in many countries searching for nitazenes is not a standard procedure in cases of polysubstance overdoses. Indeed, in Estonia and Latvia, two microcosms where more thorough investigations have been conducted, the data is alarming. Between 2022 and 2023, overdose deaths in Estonia went from 82 to 119 and in Latvia from 63 to 154 (a rate 6 and 5.3 times higher than the European average respectively) and death was caused by nitazenes in 52 percent and 66 percent of cases, respectively.
From 2020 to today, almost all new substances identified by the EU’s Early Warning System belong to the nitazenes group, of which 22 variants are being monitored. And if concerns about the spread of these opioids in Europe don’t prove to be a false alarm, we could find ourselves facing a catastrophe. The potency of these drugs is such that an imperceptible overdose, not to mention involuntary consumption, can be fatal. All the more so because, while there is extensive scientific literature on morphine, heroin and fentanyl, which were created for therapeutic uses (and it’s therefore known how to promptly use naloxone, better known as “Narcan,” to save someone who has overdosed), almost nothing is known about nitazenes, which were briefly studied as painkillers in the 1950s by an ancestor of Novartis, Ciba, and then immediately excluded from both medical and veterinary use precisely because they were too difficult to dose.
Much will depend on the availability on the market of opium with which to produce heroin (anti-prohibitionists from the liberal and libertarian think tank Cato Institute believe it was precisely the “war on drugs” that favored the spread in America of new substances, increasingly potent, unknown and dangerous). And it will also depend on the choices of drug trafficking multinationals that distribute goods along European routes and on the agility and pervasiveness of those acting “on their own” online. Because, as a rule, it’s more supply than demand that shapes the drug market.
