Mexico is facing a dire shortage of fentanyl for medical use, a new government report warned — despite cartels producing loads of the illicit drug and smuggling it into the US.
The study, published Friday by Mexico’s National Commission on Mental Health and Addictions, did not offer a reason for the puzzling shortage but said it was a global issue.
Fentanyl, used for anesthesia in hospitals, had to be imported into Mexico, the commission said. And those imports reportedly dropped by more than 50% between 2022 and 2023.
Meanwhile, Mexican cartels have been concocting their own batches of the synthetic drug — which is fatal in just miniscule amounts — and sending it across the border.
The report says Mexican seizures of illicit fentanyl rose 1.24 tons in 2020 to 1.85 tons in 2023 — a near 50% increase.
And addiction to illicit fentanyl in Mexico has increased in areas near the border, which the report blames on the US.
“Despite the limitations of availability in pharmaceutical fentanyl in our country, the excessive use of opiates in recent decades in the United States has had important repercussions on consumption and supply in Mexico,” the report states.
Requests for addiction treatment in Mexico have skyrocketed nearly 500% over the last three years, jumping from just 72 cases in 2020 to 430 cases in 2023.
While that number appears staggeringly small alongside the roughly 70,000 overdose deaths in America each year caused by synthetic opioids, the Mexican government offers few options for citizens to seek help for addiction and the number of those struggling is likely significantly higher.
The lack of available medical fentanyl has caused anesthesiologists to acquire it on their own and conserve their supplies, which can have deadly consequences.
In 2022, anesthetics contaminated by those practices caused a meningitis outbreak in the northern state of Durango that killed about three dozen people, many of whom were pregnant women given epidurals.
Then last year, several Americans died because of a similar outbreak after undergoing surgery at clinics in the Mexican border city of Matamoros.
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has had contradictory responses to the absurd problem of an overproduction of illegal fentanyl while not having enough for medicinal use.
He proposed banning fentanyl outright — even for medical purposes — in 2023, but quickly pulled back following backlash from doctors.
Obrador has denied that Mexican cartels produce the opioid — despite overwhelming evidence they import chemicals from Asia and cook it up themselves. He’s claimed the cartels only press the drug into pill form.
The US Department of State’s 2023 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report found that “approximately 96 percent of all fentanyl seized by CBP originated in Mexico, with only 270 kg reaching the United States from other destinations.”
With Post wires
