A new type of opioid is killing people in the US, Europe and Australia

American and European Officials are fighting a new enemy in the war on opioids. Nitazine, a class of synthetic drugs 40 times more potent than fentanyl, has caused hundreds of confirmed deaths in Europe and the United States since appearing on the radar of law enforcement agencies in 2019.

Nitazine was first synthesized in the 1950s by CIBA Aktiengesellschaft, an Austrian chemical company, which developed chemically related molecules with varying degrees of analgesic potency. However, their use as pain relievers has never diminished. In addition to being highly addictive, nitazine can cause respiratory depression, a dangerous condition where breathing is too little to replenish the oxygen in the blood. So these drugs were largely unheard of for decades until they appeared on the illegal market.

It’s hard to say exactly when nitazine became commonly sold as a street drug — identifying it requires special testing that isn’t routinely done — but law enforcement agencies began noticing it about six years ago. A load of one of these synthetic molecules — isotonitazene — was stopped in the American Midwest in 2019, and deaths were reported in the United States and Europe in the following years.

Drug makers and dealers may have been attracted to nitazines because of their potency and because they have similar effects to popular drugs like heroin. This makes them a useful commodity for dealers, as they can use them to cut other opioids to further their drug, increasing the volume they can sell. This poses serious risks to users, who are often unaware of what they are actually taking, increasing the risk of overdose.

Another attractive feature of Nitazine was that the authorities had forgotten about it: a drug with little attention, as well as an ill-defined legal status, is easy to trade. It is believed that illegal laboratories began synthesizing nitazine using historical chemical formulas found in pharmacology textbooks, as well as developing new formulas.

In the United States, nitazin is now widespread in many parts of the country and is produced in illegal laboratories in Mexico or within the country with raw materials supplied by Asian traffickers. Synthetic opioids are the most problematic drug in the United States — accounting for about 70 percent of the 105,000 overdose deaths recorded in 2023 — and of these, fentanyl is the most common. But Natazin, while still a minority drug, is rapidly becoming more common.

Europe, for its part, has always been in the market for heroin, almost all of which comes from Afghanistan. However, when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021, they banned poppy cultivation, thus cutting off the source of raw materials for the manufacture of heroin for Europe. As opium supplies run out, it is possible that there will be a shortage of heroin on the European market that synthetic opioids can fill.