Breaking Worse: America’s Fentanyl Problem
It is nine years, almost to the day, since Breaking Bad concluded with the final episode of season 5. At the time, it felt like a show drawn straight from the front lines of the drugs war. Now, it feels like a prescient reminder of the ever-changing nature of the trade. It also made an antihero of a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who discovers that he possesses a unique skill. Walter White was supremely gifted when it came to making crystal meth. He was, in fact, so gifted that his product was so pure as to appear blue.
The blueness of White’s meth is one small detail where the narcotically well-informed show diverged from reality. Pure crystal meth is colourless or white, but “Blue Sky” was a clever fabrication on behalf of the show’s writers that helped distinguish White’s product from the rest. Yet, even if the plot point was a fabrication, it was based on a foundational truth of America’s drug culture which is the great paranoia around illicitly bought narcotics. Drugs are so often cut with other ingredients, maliciously transformed to make the supply go further by boosting their potency, that it’s often impossible to know what is or is not authentic. White’s drug is pure and blue. Very few illegal narcotics share such a distinguishing feature.
Yet even as Hollywood made crystal meth their drug of choice, another drug was emerging to become the source of a new epidemic. Breaking Bad ended in 2013 at the start of the Third Great Opioid Wave. The previous two waves had crested on the back of prescription opioids and then heroin. The third began with the rise of fentanyl, a drug first synthesised in 1959 by the Belgian physician, Paul Janssen. Despite its fearsome reputation in recent years – 56,000 people died from overdosing of synthetic opioids in 2020, an eighteen-fold increase from 2013 – fentanyl was (and is) considered a boon for the treatment of pain. Legitimate uses of the drug highlight it as a positive force in the world. Yet, such a potent drug was hardly going to remain firmly in safe hands.
In the past half a decade, illicit use has grown with staggering speed. “Heroin Epidemic Is Yielding to a Deadlier Cousin: Fentanyl” reported The New York Times as recently as 2016. Three years later, however, America was already experiencing the drug in epidemic form. The same paper reported in 2019 how “China Cracks Down on Fentanyl. But Is It Enough to End the U.S. Epidemic?” Fentanyl had become the newest bad boy, found in the toxicology reports around the deaths of Prince and Tom Petty, as well as many others. When Michael K. Williams, star of The Wire, died last year, it was reported that he had succumbed to an overdose of “fentanyl, parafluorofentanyl, heroin, and cocaine”
The last detail is key. Fentanyl is often a shadow drug, hiding behind the notoriety of other drugs, but making them even more dangerous. As Dr Nora Volkow, director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has put it: “In addition to heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine are becoming more dangerous due to contamination with highly potent fentanyl, and increases in higher risk use patterns such as multiple substance use and regular use”. Fentanyl is considered up to 100 times more powerful than morphine. A lethal dose is 2mg or just the weight of three grains of sugar. In other words: a little bit goes a long way. It means it’s hard to quantify in hard numbers. Seizures of fentanyl at the US southern border so far in 2022 seem significantly smaller than those for the other drugs: marijuana (131k lbs), methamphetamine (161k), khat (167k)… Fentanyl, by contrast, is just 12.9k.
For the drug cartels, the appeal is obvious. Even in terms of production, it’s a much less messy operation. It is synthesised in the lab and doesn’t require any real estate like poppy fields. In the US, meanwhile, fentanyl’s ubiquity has given rise to full-on panic. Videos of police officers collapsing after simply touching the powder have spread across social media. Video of a San Diego police officer “succumbing” to supposed fentanyl exposure has been described by experts as an example of a “nocebo: the opposite of a placebo, where thinking something will harm you might be enough to make you feel like you’re experiencing a negative reaction. Toxicologists doubt the validity of the videos but, in the public’s imagination, fentanyl has become the drug that can kill on contact. It is the kind of misinformation that can delay treating those suffering from an overdose.
The danger is so pronounced that legislators across North America are now proposing alternative methods of dealing with the threat. Cocaine users are being encouraged to use test strips that identify the presence of fentanyl. Canada is currently trialling a scheme across British Columbia to decriminalise “the possession of up to 2.5 grams of opioids — including heroin, morphine and fentanyl — powdered and crack cocaine, methamphetamines, and MDMA, also known as ecstasy”, with users instead offered health intervention and advice. In Seattle, there’s a push to encourage those attending music festivals to carry sticks of Narcan, a nasal spray that can be used to save the life of somebody experiencing an overdose.
The fear, though, is that fentanyl is hardly the end of the story. It took considerable pressure on China to make the drug illegal but there are now newer drugs being synthesised, including carfentanil, 100 times more potent than fentanyl and notoriously used to subdue (or, in 25 cases, kill) those involved in 2002’s Moscow siege. The fabricated nature of the drugs also opens the possibility of defying sanctions through chemical means. Slight modifications in the molecular structure of the drug can be enough to evade classification and therefore bans.
Exotic chemistry is therefore requiring a different approach from lawmakers who struggled to adapt legislation to such ever-moving targets. Joe Biden recently called fentanyl “a flat killer” and his administration has proposed the Safer America Plan, a $37 billion package which includes legislation expressly designed to close such loopholes and “permanently schedule all fentanyl-related substances into Schedule I so traffickers of these deadly substances face the penalties they deserve.”
The goal may be admirable, but the challenge is no less difficult than pandemics or European wars and, in many ways, will prove tougher given the US’s historical failure to prosecute their war against drugs. A system of laws set up to deal with stable and known substances struggles to track chemistry constantly tweaked inside modern, high-tech labs in China and elsewhere. It’s this industrialisation of the illegal narcotics trade that makes Walter White seem quaint, less than a decade ago, cooking his sky-blue poison in an old RV in the middle of the desert.
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