The Drug Enforcement Administration is back with a new National Drug Threat Assessment, the annual report that returned in 2024 after a three-year hiatus. The 2025 NDTA, published May 15, is more bloated than 2024’s, despite the palpable sense that the DEA is running out of things to say.
Probably the most useful piece of information in the 2025 NDTA is confirmation that fentanyl purity has been decreasing—at least in samples seized by the DEA. The average purity of fentanyl powder samples was 11.36 percent, down from 19.2 percent in 2024.
In 2024 the agency had also reported that an estimated seven out of 10 fentanyl pressed pills contained a so-called “deadly dose” of 2 mg or more. Per the most recent data from the DEA fentanyl profiling program, that’s now dropped to five out of 10 pills.
Though the DEA obviously didn’t frame it this way, what the data show is that—technically—the average fentanyl pressed pill no longer contains a “deadly dose,” since the average fentanyl content is now 1.94 mg per pill. This doesn’t mean much; drug-checking data will always skew toward what the drug-checker had access to and was interested in, and the “deadly dose” premise is not sound to begin with.
In the struggle to find things to highlight, the DEA’s press release stated that one key finding was that over 4 million youth and young adults reported vaping marijuana in the past year, a claim that isn’t even in the report at all. A line-item in the Marijuana section states that over 4 million youth and young adults reported using marijuana in the past year.
Continuing on the same trajectory as the past several years, methamphetamine seizures went down in 2024, but seizures of methamphetamine in pill form went up. The increase appears to be driven by counterfeit MDMA tablets at least as much as, if not more than, counterfeit Adderall tablets.
Though the 2025 report didn’t necessarily have anything insightful to share for its section on cocaine, it did come up with a kinda catchy new term: “While unintentional mixing of cocaine and fentanyl does occur, US-based [drug trafficking organizations] are intentionally adulterating cocaine with fentanyl to create a ‘super speedball’ or to heighten the addictive qualities in cocaine for increased profit.”
Even if setting aside the issue of whether any drug is inherently addictive, fentanyl does not make cocaine more addictive or vice versa. Which is part of why this premise—fentanyl being a mostly intentional additive to the cocaine supply—is also not sound to begin with.
The longer the DEA goes on existing, the more it seems to point out why it shouldn’t exist; there’s only so many times that the same report can praise increased drug enforcement and condemn the fact that increased enforcement has once again begat more drugs.
“[S]uppliers are advertising and shipping an ever-diversifying array of ‘designer’ fentanyl precursors that, arguably, are exempt from mounting regulations.”
“Mexican [transnational criminal organizations] have moved away from heavily restricted [methamphetamine] precursors in favor of less restricted, easier-to-obtain chemicals.”
“New nitazenes [appear] when the ones currently on the market become riskier to produce due to regulatory actions and drug scheduling.”
In 2024 the DEA claimed that consuming nitazenes with fentanyl amplified the effects of both and increased the likelihood of fatal overdose. This was already a reach, but in its 2025 section on nitazenes the agency has swung a bit bigger.
“[W]hen combined with other drugs, the effects of each drug are exaggerated, significantly increasing the risk of an overdose and addiction. The presence of nitazenes, alone or in polydrug mixtures, highlights the threats nitazenes pose to users in an already-dangerous synthetic opioid market.”
Nitazenes don’t have some universal power to make all other drugs more “addictive.” And, annoying tautologies aside, if the DEA had any supporting citations for its implication that nitazenes are a free-standing presence in the drug supply, rather than an additive found in fentanyl, it probably would have cited them.
Top and inset image (cropped) via United States Drug Enforcement Administration
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