The Drug You’ve Never Heard of Wreaking Havoc Across Europe

0:05There's a drug that's fueling a growing crisis of overdose deaths. And it's not fentanyl. A new substance is emerging in illicit drug markets. It's the most deadly drug you've probably never heard of. It's an opioid called nitazines. A synthetic opioid so potent that this makes fentanyl look weak. And it's been killing hundreds of people. Super strength synthetic opioid drugs linked to hundreds of deaths have been found in samples of fake medicines sold online. The drug has led to deaths and overdoses all over the world, from West Africa to Australia, even some in the U.S. But it's had the most impact in Europe.

0:46Europe for a long time has kind of evaded the type of opioid crisis that has hit the U.S. and that the U.S. has been suffering under for three decades now. That's our colleague Suna Rasmussen, who covers security and organized crime. And once these nitsines started hitting the streets of Europe and overdoses just shot up in those countries and those communities where they landed, I think a lot of people watching this stuff was concerned about whether this might be Europe's opioid moment.

1:22Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, August 12th.

1:35Coming up on the show, the drug you've never heard of that's wreaking havoc across Europe.

1:54Nitazines are a synthetic opioid, like fentanyl. But unlike fentanyl, nitazines have never been approved for medical use. Nitazines were developed in the 1950s, and they were never approved to market because they were found in trials to cause breathing difficulties. And that's maybe the main difference between nitazines and fentanyl, at least to understand sort of why nitazines, we only see them now, is that fentanyl does have a medical usage. You can get fentanyl on prescription in patches, for example. As a synthetic opioid, nitazines are made in labs. Today, mostly labs in China. but it's much more powerful than other opioids, 50 to 250 times more powerful than heroin, and up to 15 times stronger than fentanyl.

2:41Let's try and visualize the amount of these drugs that are required for an overdose in what we call an opioid-naive person. That would be you and me, people I assume don't have like a sort of regular opioid habit, an adult of normal size. So around 30 milligrams of heroin would usually be a potentially lethal dose. That amount of heroin takes up the size of the head of a matchstick. For fentanyl, just two milligrams can cause an overdose. For netazines, it takes an even smaller amount. The most common street netazines in Europe at the moment, you'd only require one milligram, maybe only half a milligram to potentially overdose.

3:25We're talking, you know, a few grains of table salt. That's the amount. So incredibly small, vanishingly small amounts. It's not something that you can really identify just by sight. Yeah, it's basically trace amounts. In 2019, nidazines started showing up in drug seizures in Europe, and authorities took notice. Since then, hundreds have died from fatal overdoses. Countries where heroin already has a significant foothold have been particularly vulnerable. like Estonia, where nearly half of all drug-induced deaths since 2023 involved nitazines. In the UK, during a period of over 18 months until January of this year, at least 400 people died.

4:09That's a lot of people in a country of the size of the UK. And we should also say that those numbers are likely underestimates because testing for nitazines is so limited because people aren't really aware of them. A lot of documentation of netazines relies on self-reporting. These numbers are likely underestimates. Have you talked to anyone who knows someone who died from the effects of netazines? Yeah, I spoke to Anne Jacques, who is a mother who lives in Wales and who in the summer of 2023 was woken up when police knocked her door and told her that her 23-year-old son had died in his sleep in his student accommodation in London.

4:51Her son, Alex Harpam, was a college student and rising opera singer. Here he is in a video he posted to YouTube.

5:02His mother said that he was healthy. In an interview with the BBC, she said that he occasionally took Xanax to help him sleep. He was always having trouble sleeping, and this had got worse with his ADHD medication. And my hunch is he probably bought them to calm himself down and try and get some sleep, I think. But the police found out that the Xanax Harpam took had come from the black market. Xanax is not that easy to get in the UK, so people will often buy them illicitly from drug dealers. At first, authorities didn't think the black market Xanax was related to what happened. They attributed Harpam's death to something called sudden adult death syndrome, a type of heart attack.

5:48But Harpam's mom didn't buy that. She's a medical professional herself, and she consulted with friends. And they recommended that she do some research into drug contaminants. And then she came across nitazines and specifically asked the coroner to test the tablets in her son's room for nitazines. And then they came back months after his death and confirmed that there had been nitizines in these Xanax pills. So she essentially had to do her own research to be able to find out that that was the actual... Yeah, she told me she basically had to investigate her own son's death, yeah. But this is something that really concerns health professionals here in the UK, is that one thing is that nitizines are in the heroin supply, because that's sort of the most, I guess, obvious place where it would be, and it's maybe a bit more predictable.

6:39But if it's also circulating and if it's also contaminating the supply of much more harmless medication, really, Valium and Xanax, that poses a whole other level of threat. Most of the overdoses from netazines happened to people unaware they were even taking the drug. And that's because netazines are cut into other drugs, most commonly heroin. But it's also been found in popular party drugs like cocaine, ketamine, and ecstasy. Or, like in Harpam's case, Xanax. If they're so potent and so deadly, why would drug dealers cut nitazines into drugs in the first place? It kind of depends on maybe what kind of drugs they're found in.

7:19Like, mostly nitazines are found in heroin. And I think the reasoning there would be that you try to cut heroin with a contaminant that gives, you know, a similar effect to heroin, but is much more cost-effective. And if you get the dose right, you can increase your profits. And maybe I think the theory that people go by now is drug suppliers are experimenting with nitidines to see how they can achieve an effect that mimics the drugs at a lower cost, maybe even sort of give people a stronger high at a lower cost. That's at least the assessment from British law enforcement is that this is pure greed and drug suppliers are trying to maximize profits.

8:03This kind of opioid crisis hasn't ravaged Europe the way it has the U.S. And there's a reason for that. The U.S. has suffered from this opioid epidemic since the 1990s, basically. And there's two big waves of opioids that have hit the U.S. The first was in the 1990s, and it was fueled by aggressive marketing and private prescriptions of synthetic opioids. And European medical practices are different. So you can't get synthetic opioids prescribed in Europe in the same way that you can in the U.S. Like Oxy. You wouldn't be able to get that prescribed there. Yes, exactly. OxyContin was the big one in the U.S.

8:44And then in the 2010s, the second wave hit the U.S., and that was fentanyl specifically. And that was because Mexican cartels began funneling fentanyl into the U.S. So those are the two big events. Since Europe didn't have Oxycontin or fentanyl circulating in its drug market, nitazines have filled a hole for synthetic opioids. What have European governments said or done about nitazines? The UK government has said that this is the most dangerous time ever to take drugs, and that's partly because of nitazines. I spoke to a director of a British drug treatment organization here in the UK, And she said that nidazines pose the biggest public health risk to British drug users since the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s.

9:31So that's putting into perspective how serious people are taking this.

9:40So we've talked about where nidazines are coming from. We've talked about sort of the causes of why it's surging in Europe right now. But how are nidazines getting into Europe? Yeah, so netazines, interestingly, netazines are not that difficult to get a hold of, it appears, and they're not that difficult to source. Just how easy it is to get netazines? That's next.

10:22For this story, our colleague Suna texted a number of NitaZine's suppliers. I asked him to read out one of those exchanges. Hello, can you send NitaZines to Europe? Hello, friend. Yes. How much do you need? We used a bot to voice the supplier Suna was texting. To the UK as well? Can you clear customs? Yes, we can ship to the UK. We offer door-to-door delivery with double customs clearance and tax included. Suna found the supplier online. What's the max quantity you can send? It depends on your needs. We use disguise packaging, which is very safe. Large quantities can be shipped. Kilos? After Suna sent that last message, the person on the other end responded with a picture of two boxes filled with bags of cat food.

11:11The presumption is that they were filled with mitazines. Suna found this person on a site called TradeKey, an online marketplace based in Pakistan. Usually, businesses use it to import or export things like furniture and appliances between different countries. But Suna learned it was really easy to find netazines on the site too. I just typed into the search bar, typed in a couple of different types of netazines. I typed in proto-netazines and isoto-netazines. And then I got like, the first time around, I got 88 different ads for this. Wow. And they come complete with phone numbers for WhatsApp or Signal, Telegram, sometimes even an email.

11:52And then I just started texting them and most people got back to me. TradeKey said it has a zero-tolerance policy toward the sale of opioids on its site and has added nitazines to its registry of banned products. And since Suna's story was published, those ads he found have been removed. In his conversation with a drug supplier, Suna tried to learn more about how they were justifying their business. I'm a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, and I reached out to you because I'm writing a story about nitzizines. Would you mind if I asked you a few additional questions? Okay. Nitzizines are a highly potent and dangerous type of opioid.

12:27It's killed hundreds of people in Europe. Do you have any reservations about selling these drugs, given how dangerous they are? We are a legitimate manufacturer and only work with licensed pharmaceutical companies. The dangers you mentioned are the results of misuse and abuse by individuals, not the product itself. This question shouldn't be directed at me. You should be asking how your own country is managing this issue. Why can't your own country control the misuse of drugs? This is a little bit sort of boilerplate drug supplier. Is that typically what they say? I mean, I, Suna, I don't engage in text messages with drug suppliers very often.

13:02I've got to be honest with you. Yeah, I mean, it's a shifting blame, right? I mean, when I used to report from Afghanistan, I would sometimes go to poppy fields in Helmand and report on the poppy trade there. And I've also spoken to Taliban fighters and later Taliban officials. And they would say sort of similar things, right? They would say, well, if there wasn't a demand in Europe, there wouldn't be a market for us. So, I mean, they're not wrong, right? But also it doesn't absolve them of responsibility, obviously. And I mean, the other thing about the exchange was that the person didn't sound like they were worried about getting caught.

13:35It was very straightforward. And like, here's how we're going to do it. We offer door-to-door delivery is really interesting. So I don't know. What do you make of that? Yeah, no, totally. Like, it was very brazen. And also, like, there's nothing preceding that. Like, they didn't ask who I was. They didn't ask for reference from a trusted customer or anything like that. Just straight in offering to send netazines to Europe. And I think that is kind of evidence of they work with impunity. And I just took that as a sign that they weren't really worried about law enforcement clamping down on them.

14:10The people that Suno was texting had phone numbers from Hong Kong or mainland China. China is where most ingredients for netazines come from, just like fentanyl. Recently, China has cracked down on fentanyl producers as part of trade negotiations with the U.S. As a result, Suna says many drug suppliers in China could be turning to Europe to find a new market. That's one going theory, at least. We should caveat this by saying that this is still such a—we're still in the beginning of this wave of nittazines hitting Europe, so law enforcement is still grappling with what's going on and the causes of it.

14:44But yes, one theory is that because China has cracked down on precursors for fentanyl, suppliers might be pivoting into nitazines instead and then sending it into Europe. So that is one ongoing theory. And I think this speaks to the ability of drug suppliers to adapt to various restrictions that they might face in a changing drug market. And while China has regulated certain kinds of nitazines, it hasn't been able to ban all of them. And that's because if you just tweak the formula of a synthetic opioid a little bit, it kind of evades these controls.

15:24So what have you learned as you've reported about the rise of this new drug? As a European sitting in Europe, I think, you know, we for decades looked at the U.S. and saw how synthetic opioids ravaged America. and Europe never really had this kind of problem. And I and the other people, the other few people who follow Nitzitzin are watching to see whether this is Europe's opioid moment. I guess we'll see now how vulnerable Europe really is to a big opioid epidemic and how serious the influx of opioids will be. Do you think they could proliferate more here in the U.S.? I don't think our American listeners should go into panic mode just yet.

16:12The American market is already, to put it bluntly, like it's already saturated with fentanyl. There has been rare good news on the fentanyl front in the US in recent months. The number of overdose deaths has declined. I think the main reason for that is better harm reduction, better access to treatment, better access to naloxone, This antidote you can administer, better information. But part of it could also be that China has sort of squeezed the supplies of precursors for fentanyl. But drug traffickers and organized gangs, they are very good at adapting. And netizens could be a way that they could adapt.

16:55And American authorities are watching this to see if that's going to happen.

17:11That's all for today, Tuesday, August 12th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Ming Lee.

17:25Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.