Fentanyl Is in Everything

Around 2013, fentanyl started percolating in the United States street opioid supply, which was heroin-based at that time. Over the next few years it steadily pushed heroin out of the East Coast, and once the COVID-19 pandemic hit it rapidly did the same on the West Coast. As crackdowns have pushed the drug supply to evolve more quickly and chaotically, fentanyl has gradually begun showing up with non-opioid drugs.

Media and law enforcement, however, tend to describe it as an additive that predatory distributors mix into whatever they’re distributing—cocaine, meth, heroin, marijuana, vapes, pills that look like pharmaceuticals.

Fentanyl sometimes ends up in meth and cocaine supplies, probably not intentionally. This varies a lot by region and isn’t as common as most local news stories would have you believe, but is important to be aware of.

A pressed pill sold as Percocet or Oxycodone might not contain fentanyl, but you should assume that it does, if you don’t have the means to check. Same goes for anything sold as Xanax. A pressed pill sold as Adderall could conceivably contain fentanyl, but that would make it a pretty significant anomaly; what you should assume that it contains is meth.

We tend to fixate on whether something does or does not contain fentanyl, but that binary distinction isn’t what determines the risk. Someone opioid-naive who buys a fentanyl pressed pill that they believe to be real Percocet will still be okay if the amount of fentanyl in the pill is small enough. Conversely, someone who smokes what they know to be fentanyl pills off foil every day will be overdosing within minutes if they get one with more fentanyl than they were expecting.

Has fentanyl been found in marijuana? It has not. Periodically there are news stories or other vaguely credible-sounding claims to this effect, but none of them ever stand up to scrutiny. The one that got arguably the most traction was a 2021 statement from Connecticut health officials, announcing “the first lab confirmed case of marijuana with fentanyl in Connecticut and possibly the first confirmed case in the United States” and citing 39 incidents “where only marijuana use was reported but naloxone was required.” Later it turned out that this boiled down to a single case of minor, accidental cross-contamination among people who also used opioids.

You can immediately write off any claims of fentanyl being smoked with marijuana, or smoked with anything else using a combustion process rather than a vaping process. Fentanyl can’t be smoked with an open flame; it gets burned and rendered inactive.

A very small number of vapes appear to have tested positive for fentanyl. For one thing, this would probably happen with literally any physical object that school boards across the country started continuously testing for fentanyl. But the important takeaway is that the more credible claims involve vapes that had clearly been modified intentionally for personal use, not vapes that had been designed that way and marketed to children. You can still pick out any news story that describes a middle- or high-school student nearly dying from using a “fentanyl-laced vape”—even the stories circulated by elected representatives—and reliably find that it has either since been debunked or does not mention any actual laboratory confirmation of fentanyl, despite whatever the headline said. Usually the source for the claim is the student or their mom.

Higher-Potency Opioids Need Extra Doses of Naloxone

Naloxone works by binding to your mu receptors—the specific protein molecules that opioids also bind to—and kicking off whatever opioids might already be there. The clinical dose of naloxone, 0.4 mg/mL, is what’s usually sufficient to reach about 50 percent of your mu receptors, or enough to reverse an overdose. That’s why 0.4 mg/mL is the dose contained in a vial of generic intramuscular naloxone.

A Narcan nasal spray contains a 4-mg dose of naloxone. Intranasal administration can’t be directly compared to intramuscular, but it’s the less efficient of the two and so Narcan is designed to deliver more than the clinical dose. A 4-mg Narcan was more than enough for most heroin overdoses, is still more than enough for most fentanyl overdoses, and is also still more than enough for most overdoses involving fentanyl analogs, nitazenes, orphines and whatever novel synthetic opioids are found in the supply next. Naloxone’s effectiveness doesn’t change based on the opioid’s potency, since it acts on the mu receptors rather than on the opioids themselves.

When cops or well-meaning bystanders share stories about someone needing five doses of Narcan to wake up, and how this just shows how much more potent the supply is these days and how naloxone doesn’t cut it anymore, this almost always comes from the same mistaken assumptions about overdose reversal.

Naloxone takes two or three minutes to kick in, which is why it’s important to administer rescue breathing while you wait. But because the two minutes that you’re supposed to wait before administering a second dose can understandably feel like an eternity, especially to anyone not experienced in these situations, the temptation is often to pump in a second dose pretty quickly. Or a third dose, or fourth, or fifth, and so on until the person wakes up. When someone wakes up after a fifth Narcan, what you’re really seeing is the first dose kick in. All the extra naloxone did nothing to help, and for people with a physical tolerance to opioids it can precipitate withdrawal and put them at increased risk of overdosing again. At a proper dose, reversing an overdose with naloxone doesn’t require waking the person up at all.

In 2021, the 8-mg Kloxxado nasal sprays hit the market and marked the beginning of the naloxone arms race. In the five years since then, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a 5-mg intramuscular autoinjector—meaning it delivers about 12.5 more naloxone than the clinical dose—a 10-mg nasal spray that launched earlier in 2026. It’s also moved beyond naloxone to a different, longer-acting opioid antagonist, nalmefene. The first nalmefene nasal spray, Opvee, has already been followed by a nalmefene auto-injector. And government contracts investing in nalmefene as a preventative measure for fentanyl nuclear war. And biased research inventing meaningless metrics that are supposed to justify any of this as necessary.

Naltrexone Is Safe and Effective

Technically, the US has three approved medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD). In reality, we have two MOUD that are shown to be safe and effective, and we have naltrexone. Methadone and buprenorphine (Suboxone) decrease overdose risk. Naltrexone’s labeling is required to carry a warning that it increases fatal overdose risk.

Naltrexone is commonly known by brand name Vivitrol, the injectable formulation touted in county jails and other correctional settings. While methadone and buprenorphine are opioid agonists, naltrexone is an opioid antagonist—like naloxone and nalmefene. It purports to work by blocking the effect of opioids, so that even if a patient tries to use opioids they won’t feel anything.

What this effectively does is reduce tolerance, which is why the FDA labeling has to warn that deaths have been documented “at the end of a dosing interval, after missing a scheduled dose, or after discontinuing treatment.” The warning about risk of fatal overdose from “[a]ttempts to overcome blockade” is similar to the warning carried by the two approved nalmefene products, Opvee and Zurnai.

Unlike methadone and buprenorphine, naltrexone requires detoxing prior to initiating the medication—going into withdrawal for at least a week, maybe two. That alone makes it a non-starter for a substantial portion of people at risk. A recurring theme with research supporting naltrexone’s efficacy is that it doesn’t count the people who tried to start the medication and weren’t able to get through the detox process, preferring to factor in only the cases where people did manage to onboard. Or it uses the framing that once detox is out of the way, “naltrexone is about as effective as buprenorphine,” which still isn’t true.

People stabilize on methadone and buprenorphine because those MOUD help manage cravings and withdrawal symptoms. But studies tracking naltrexone outcomes never show anything long-term. Conclusions that it reduces cravings come from short-term data, and any evidence of its efficacy is based on negative urine drug screens after a few weeks or at most a few months. This research is never concerned with what happens after that. The idea of naltrexone remains popular because it fits an abstinence mentality, it’s punitive and it’s an easy out for corrections departments. Not because it’s helpful.

Syringe Litter

As popular as it is to demonize syringe service programs (SSP), the arguments against them don’t see too much innovation. There’s the complaint that SSP increase “crime,” which is not true. There’s the complaint that they increase drug use, which is not true. The most substantive complaint is that they increase “syringe litter.” This is also not true.

Neighborhoods that open SSP are overwhelmingly associated with a decrease in publicly discarded syringes, for a few different reasons. They’re often more convenient than sharps-disposal bins in parks, which require people to make a separate trip just to have fewer syringes than before. They provide portable sharps containers that are small enough for people to carry around, and larger ones people can keep at home. And they employ peer workers who do daily walkabouts picking up any syringes they see on sidewalks or other public areas.

At the heart of the syringe litter myth is the suggestion that children are at risk of contracting HIV from stepping on a needle while playing at the park. This is an easy one to debunk: It has never happened. There has never been a single documented case of anyone, child or adult, contracting HIV from a publicly discarded needle. It’s just another myth.

The human immunodeficiency virus is very fragile and relies on our immune cells to survive. Once outside the body, exposed to air, it dries up and dies almost immediately. This is why the only confirmed HIV needlestick transmissions have all involved health care workers in hospital settings, and even then they’re extremely rare. For the public, transmission risk is limited to situations involving blood, semen, vaginal or rectal fluids, or breastmilk delivered directly to a mucous membrane or into the bloodstream.

The hepatitis C virus can actually live for several weeks outside the human body, but globally there have been maybe three documented cases of hep C transmission from accidental needlesticks in community settings; none in the US nor involving children. Hep C can be easily and painlessly cured with oral medication, and doesn’t begin to damage the body for years or even decades.

As often as the media runs stories about syringe litter, you might notice that the accompanying photos often show a syringe with the front and back cap still on, sterile as the day it was born, thoughtfully arranged in the middle of a ditch. I was going to make a joke about how eventually they’ll show one of those individually packaged 27-gauge 1 cc syringes still in its individual package, but this has already happened.

Secondhand Overdose From Drugs in Prison Mail

After that viral video with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department deputy in 2021, the online harm reduction community got the rare satisfaction of rallying around a talking point—you cannot overdose from touching fentanyl—and seeing the media actually take notice. A lot of news stories will now add some kind of disclaimer when referencing passive exposure, though this remains pretty hit or miss. You can’t overdose from skin contact. You can’t overdose from breathing in fentanyl molecules floating around in the air; fentanyl has a very low vapor pressure and barely releases any molecules into the air anyway. You can’t overdose from any other kind of passive exposure. The public is now moderately more aware that there is no such thing as secondhand fentanyl overdose. However, like everything else in harm reduction, this development has not made it into the prison system.

US prisons and jails have a completely different drug supply than the free world. There is fentanyl, but the mainstays are generally synthetic cannabinoids (K2; Spice) meth, Suboxone, tobacco and strips, a catch-all term for the ubiquitous strips of paper soaked with what could be anything, but is often synthetic cannabinoids or household solvents like insecticide. In recent years, many facilities have seen synthetic cannabinoids and/or strips replace meth or other contraband similarly to the way fentanyl replaced heroin in the outside drug supply.

Countless press releases and Facebook announcements have described how corrections officers required Narcan (multiple doses!) and were hospitalized following exposure to dangerous synthetic cannabinoids and other drugs concealed in incoming mail. This does not mean the officers were harmed. It does not mean the officers were ever in harm’s way. It does not even necessarily mean the officers were exposed to any drugs. It means that officers gave themselves Narcan and took themselves to the hospital. Synthetic cannabinoids are not opioids and are not affected by Narcan, but the whole situation is so far beyond logic that we don’t have time to stop for this.

The only one of these incidents that’s ever cited actual harm was in 2024 at USP Atwater, when mailroom supervisor Marc Fischer reported feeling ill and then died at a hospital about two hours later. Initially the cause of death was undetermined, pending toxicology, which gave media outlets across the country an opening to run headlines about “possible fentanyl exposure.” The Merced County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to Filter’s February 2025 coroner records request, which is fine because a week later documents filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of California revealed that the cause of death was a heart attack. Neither the AP nor the Los Angeles Times nor any other media outlet that ran a “possible fentanyl exposure” headline ever published anything further. The Bureau of Prisons, Correctional Peace Officers Foundation and various other agencies continue to honor Fischer’s memory by not acknowledging the autopsy, and praising his sacrifice in the line of duty while handling synthetic drug-soaked mail.

There is no evidence to suggest that secondhand exposure to synthetic opioids or cannabinoids poses any kind of risk. Many corrections officers know this, since they’re the ones bringing in most contraband drugs anyway. But they continue to bravely share their stories, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigations conclude that mailroom staff need head-to-toe personal protective equipment and HEPA-filtered biosafety cabinets, and federal corrections officers unions use those findings to call for the expansion of digitized mail-scanning.

And that’s what all of this is really about: understaffing and the nationwide push to privatize prison mail services, and cut incarcerated people off from receiving physical letters. Along with in-person visitation, and book donations, and any other “privilege” whose physical form can be replaced with a digital service conveniently offered by a handful of for-profit contractors. More than three out of four people incarcerated in US prisons no longer have access to physical mail.

At this moment, somewhere in the US another corrections department is drafting another press release breathlessly recounting how over the weekend one or more officers were hospitalized following exposure to deadly synthetic drugs, and pleading for Congress to recognize that no one should have to risk their life just to do their job of opening other people’s mail. Media and legislators will circulate it with no scrutiny whatsoever. To date, there are no confirmed reports of any corrections officers ever having been harmed by exposure to drugs in the mail.

Meth Overdose Crisis

Opioid overdose is potentially fatal because opioid molecules can bind to the brainstem receptors that regulate breathing; the mechanism of death is respiratory depression. Meth, like synthetic cannabinoids and various other stimulants like cocaine, doesn’t have any particular mechanism of death that accompanies overdose in the same way.

Stimulant overdose, or overamps as they’re sometimes called, don’t necessarily produce stereotypical symptoms like paranoia or hyperactivity. Often they make people fall asleep. Occasionally they might cause seizures. But then they resolve, and that’s that. The harms tend to come from exposure to law enforcement, rather than the physical ordeal itself.

Meth-involved overdose deaths in the US began rising more noticeably around 2019, peaking in late 2023 before starting to gradually drop back down; the same trajectory as fentanyl-involved deaths, but less drastic. It’s clear that more people are using meth compared to a decade ago, which means more people have meth in their system at the time that they die. But it’s not quite clear that meth is what’s causing them all to die, at least not on the scale being suggested by the media.

US death investigations are a mess. Depending on the state, they might be carried out by medical examiners, elected county coroners or local law enforcement. In Nebraska, for example, cause of death is determined by prosecutors. In most California counties, the coroner is also the sheriff. Forensic pathologists are still required to sign off on the death certificate, but there are only a few hundred of them in the whole country and many jurisdictions now use forensic pathologists who aren’t board-certified. In Canada and other wealthy countries full autopsies are considered standard for suspected overdose deaths, but in the US they’re rare. Where not mandated by state law, they’re pretty much reserved for cases where law enforcement could potentially use the evidence to prosecute someone, or the family could afford a private one.

In suspected overdose cases, the death investigation often consists of toxicology and an external examination—medical history plus a long look at the body and any evidence found at the scene. None of these can reveal a heart attack, or heat stroke, or pneumonia. But they can reveal meth, and even without fentanyl that’s all that’s needed to wrap the investigation, particularly for people who die without housing. No available medical history? Well, clearly their medical history is that they used meth.

“If they had a heart death, I think [any meth] is going to get attributed as a cause of death. Because that is the bias of the system,” a toxicologist who signs off on drug death reports told Filter in 2023. “It’s like: Here’s someone that was found in a tent, we can’t contact their next of kin, we did a [urine drug screen]. They’ve got meth in their system; keep it moving. We’re not going to do an autopsy.”

Some research has suggested that meth is linked to about two out of three US deaths among people without housing. Local-level studies have found similar patterns in places like California and Oregon.

Deaths attributed to just meth, with no fentanyl present, tend to be among people who were over 45 and had a history of cardiovascular disease. To which chronic meth use may have contributed, but it wouldn’t have been the only thing. When a non drug-user dies from a heart attack in a hospital, we say they died from a heart attack—not from a sedentary lifestyle or refined carbohydrates. When a meth user dies from a heart attack and they weren’t in a hospital, their cause of death was a heart attack. But we might say it was meth, if drugs were the only thing we checked for.

Novel Synthetic Opioids, Even Deadlier Than Fentanyl

No matter how much we sensationalize fentanyl and its potency, after hearing about it for so many years the public has somewhat acclimated to the idea. So fentanyl headlines lose their power, and the only way for media outlets to combat this is with something even more potent than fentanyl.

First it was fentanyl analogs, followed by nitazenes and most recently orphines. All have the potential to be more potent than fentanyl (as well as less potent, not that this is of interest to anyone). The problem with news outlets pouncing on each novel synthetic opioid (NSO) as it hits the supply isn’t so much that they misrepresent the potency; it’s that they misrepresent the prevalence. Each NSO is presented as a harbinger, like behind the first couple of reports is a dam about to break, unleashing the substance that will replace fentanyl the way fentanyl replaced heroin. That will usher in the next wave of the overdose crisis all on its own.

Outside of North America the emergence of NSO could have a very different significance, if fentanyl hasn’t already saturated the opioid supply the way it has here. But at the moment, there’s no real reason to think that any fentanyl analogs, nitazenes or orphines are poised to overtake fentanyl in the US supply. Some of them, like carfentanil or cychlorphine, have become more recognizable names, but we’re still talking about substances linked to a very small portion of overdose deaths, and that’s including the cases where they were detected at all not just the ones where they were detected alone or determined to be the cause of death.

Most of these substances arrive mixed in with fentanyl—though some are occasionally found on their own—and aren’t really distinguishable from fentanyl, from a user perspective. Health departments will take whatever one or two talking points exist , which are probably just the location where it was detected and how many times more potent than fentanyl it’s supposed to be, and stretch them over a public bulletin that doesn’t help the public do anything differently. There’s a NSO in the supply. It’s been detected six times, in these two states; you can’t test for it and it’s not distinguishable from fentanyl. You should still use naloxone and take the precautions you were taking for fentanyl. This kind of thing is for the benefit of website traffic and re-election campaigns, not the public.

Not all recent additions to the supply are interchangeable. Xylazine and medetomidine, both non-opioid veterinary tranquilizers, have come with distinct complications and forced harm reduction groups to evolve overdose response protocols around each of them specifically. NSO have certainly reshaped how we criminalize the supply, but they haven’t really reshaped the supply itself. Even carfentanil, which has been in the US about as long as fentanyl and remains the most potent opioid we know of, has ebbed and flowed at the edge of the supply and never grown into something with a market of its own. None of them have.

No matter how potent, a substance can’t really be more deadly than fentanyl if it isn’t causing more people to die.

The post The Drug War Myths People Still Believe appeared first on Filter.

As the CSA stands currently, 10-year mandatory minimums in federal fentanyl trafficking cases are triggered at 400 grams. The Act would drop this to 20 grams. For fentanyl analogs, the threshold would drop from 100 grams to 5 grams. 

Five-year mandatory minimums are currently triggered at 40 grams, which the Act would drop to 2 grams. For fentanyl analogs, the threshold would drop from 10 grams to 0.5 grams. Analog thresholds would apply regardless of whether or not the analog in question has been scheduled.

The Act was introduced July 23 by Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) as the companion bill to the Fairness in Fentanyl Sentencing Act sponsored by Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA). The latter was introduced in February 2025 and hasn’t moved out of committee. Kennedy previously attempted it in 2023 under the Biden administration. 

Stutzman and Kennedy’s public messaging around the legislation has been that 400 grams of fentanyl, the current threshold for 10-year mandatory minimum sentencing, is enough to kill 200,000 people. This was also the case for the sponsors of the Fentanyl Penalties Parity Act of 2021, which proposed the exact same threshold modifications. But the actual threshold in the CSA is not 400 grams of fentanyl. It’s “400 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of” fentanyl, which is very different. Stutzman’s office did not immediately respond to Filter‘s inquiry.

If that logic bore out, a fentanyl pressed pill would be the size of three grains of table salt.

If you consider the common Drug Enforcement Administration talking point about how fentanyl is approximately 50 times more potent than heroin, you can imagine that it’d be difficult to sell or use a dose that’s 50 times smaller. Because of this, most of the “fentanyl” in a typical stamp bag or pressed pill is a mixture of non-psychoactive fillers like mannitol (sugar alcohol) or acetaminophen. The United States Sentencing Commission has acknowledged that the mixture’s total weight is used even “when a drug is mixed with an inert substance, such as a binder or filler used in the production of pills or tablets.” Changing a quantity threshold from e.g. 400 grams to 20 grams has no direct bearing on the amount of actual fentanyl involved.

Proponents of the Act and similar legislation, however, consistently characterize the mixtures as pure fentanyl.

“It only takes two milligrams of fentanyl to kill a person. That’s just about three grains of table salt,” stated cosponsor Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA). “Despite this, it takes 40 grams of fentanyl, or roughly three tablespoons of butter, to trigger the federal five-year mandatory minimum sentence for trafficking. That threshold simply does not reflect the deadly reality of this drug.”

If that logic bore out, a fentanyl pressed pill would be the size of three grains of table salt.

Lowering the five-year mandatory minimum threshold for fentanyl analog mixtures from 10 grams to 0.5 grams would effectively target possession and low-level distribution—0.5 grams could mean just two stamp bags, or five pills. Anyone who uses street-supply fentanyl could find themselves subject to the penalty, if what they picked up that day happen to contain trace amounts of any analogs. It’s extremely unlikely that either the buyer or seller in that scenario would know whether the bags contained any analogs, which are usually found in combination with fentanyl and many of which are comparable in potency.

The fentanyl crisis demands action. My new bill goes after drug dealers and traffickers by:

Keeping these criminals off our streets through lowering federal sentencing thresholds.
Investing $9M to strengthen drug detection, staffing, and enforcement across the Postal… pic.twitter.com/dJVslxCi8M

— Rep. Marlin Stutzman (@RepStutzman) July 24, 2026

“This bill targets the worst offenders,” stated National District Attorneys Association Executive Director Nelson Bunn. National Alliance of State Drug Enforcement Agencies Executive Director Carlon Stapleton praised the “zero-tolerance approach toward those who manufacture or distribute” fentanyl. Indiana Drug Enforcement Association President Chris Goergen condemned those who “take advantage of fentanyl’s low cost to produce as well as its high profit margin … with little to no regard for the people it hurts the most.”

USSC data show that most of the people convicted in federal overdose cases are local sellers and that, of those who’d been at the scene of the overdose when it happened, most had tried to help the victim. But it’s not clear that the Act has any direct bearing on cases linked to overdose. The CSA currently provides that regardless of whether the mixture quantity triggers a 10- or five-year mandatory minimum, the sentencing range is 20 years to life when the case is linked to overdose; the Act does not propose to change this.

“Hundreds of thousands of Americans die every year from fentanyl poisoning,” Stutzman claimed in his announcement. “I am proud to take up the No Leniency for Fentanyl Dealers Act with Senator Kennedy so those peddling this lethal substance are punished with sentences commensurate with their actions.”

Kennedy correctly described US fentanyl-involved deaths as in the tens of thousands per year, but stated that he was proud to work with Stutzman “to ensure these ghouls get the punishment they deserve.”

The legislation would additionally authorize $9 million for drug interdiction within the United States Postal Service, and require more staffing resources—namely scientists who can be “available during all operational hours” to identify suspected fentanyl as quickly as possible.

It would also direct the USSC to review the changes and, “if appropriate,” update its drug sentencing guidelines accordingly. In late 2025 the USSC amended those guidelines to deemphasize the role of thresholds in determining someone’s sentence, in recognition of how easily those numbers are distorted in court and how meaningless they were to begin with.

“I find no greater joy than putting a fentanyl dealer behind bars,” stated cosponsor Rep. Clay Fuller (R-GA).

Image (cropped) via New Hampshire Division of State Police

The post No One’s Really Expecting the “Fentanyl Dealers Act” to Make Sense appeared first on Filter.

However, a recent study published in Harm Reduction Journal warns that change is coming. Reviewing data across three key countries, the authors chart a potentially dangerous turn in South American drug markets. Synthetic opioids, ketamine and Tusi (known as “pink cocaine,” but typically including a mix of synthetic substances) have all rapidly increased in popularity—on a continent where harm reduction services, especially for opioids, are sorely lacking.

According to the study’s lead author, Ignacio Bórquez of New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, these new trends are a stark departure from the traditional local drug supply.

“What we’ve been seeing since, I would say, 2010 onwards in Latin America is the emergence of synthetic drugs.”

“Latin America and the Caribbean really have a history using cannabis and cocaine,” he told Filter. “[T]hey’re locally produced, so they’re very cheap. A gram of cocaine is around $10 in Latin America—here in the US, it’s $100.”

Bórquez and his team compared multiple data sources, including forensic analyses, law enforcement seizures and surveys of people who use drugs, to get a pulse on substance use in Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Clear trends quickly emerged.

“What we’ve been seeing since, I would say, 2010 onwards in Latin America is the emergence of synthetic drugs. Particularly in the party scene, things like MDMA, ketamine,” Bórquez said. “And then we’ve also been seeing seizures of synthetic opioids and some evidence of diverted opioids from pharmaceuticals.”

In Chile, the volume of ketamine seized annually by law enforcement rose by over 5,000 percent from 2017 to 2023, and that trajectory was corroborated in Chilean wastewater analysis. Oral samples from Brazilian nightclub attendees also showed ketamine use rising—often along with cocaine, in the combination known as Tusi.

The data tell a similar story for opioids. According to a nationally representative Chilean survey, opioid use has nearly quadrupled since 2002. While fentanyl is not a major factor in Chile or Colombia, law enforcement seizure data do show a rise. In addition, other synthetic opioids, including nitazenes, are being manufactured in Brazil.

“We are a continent torn by violence … because with crops like cocaine or cannabis, you really need territorial land.”

Globalization and online connectivity have propelled these new substances’ popularity, with rapid distribution available on social media platforms like the gay dating app Grindr. And relative to the region’s traditional plant-based drugs, these new options require far fewer resources to produce.

“We are a continent torn by violence … that has been very linked to drug trafficking and drug production, because with crops like cocaine or cannabis, you really need territorial land,” study co-author Francisco I. Bastos, of Brazil’s Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, told Filter. “And with these new substances we’re looking at, they don’t need that.”

In part because South America has not faced a major overdose crisis, the continent’s harm reduction infrastructure is vastly underdeveloped. Citing the Global State of Harm Reduction 2024, the authors note that of the 34 countries in this region, only three have syringe service programs, and only four offer opioid agonist therapy. Naloxone is also largely inaccessible.

The solution, however, is not simply to import North American and European harm reduction models, because South American patterns of drug use remain very different. While these new substances are on the rise, they still represent a minority of drug use, which continues to be dominated by stimulant smoking and concurrent alcohol use. Injecting remains largely taboo.

Bórquez loses sleep at night thinking about how to adapt harm reduction models like supervised consumption sites to communities in South America.

“It would need to be a place where stimulant use, which is very different from opioid use, could be contained in a non-harmful way,” he said. “[Y]ou’re not gonna have 30 people using stimulants together in a room … it’s hard to think of a [harm reduction] service for people who use stimulants and alcohol.”

“It is a very different balance from the US. The US is the largest producer and importer of opioids in the world … Brazil is on the other side of the balance.”

Meanwhile, attempting to combat synthetic opioid diversion by restricting importation of medical opioids would threaten the availability of these substances for their clinical uses, such as pain relief for cancer patients and palliative care.

“If we just put pressure on the supply, we cannot have medicines for the people who need the medicine,” Bastos explained. “It is a very different balance from the US. The US is the largest producer and importer of opioids in the world, so there are opioids for everything—opioids for cancer patients, opioids for the streets. Brazil is on the other side of the balance.”

Yet there are still many promising paths forward. The authors highlight drug checking, overdose prevention training and naloxone accessibility as relevant harm reduction services. They also suggest increasing investment in nonintrusive surveillance, such as local wastewater monitoring programs, to stay abreast of this rapidly shifting market and target harm reduction efforts accordingly.

“[These efforts] will be essential to mitigate future harm and prevent another synthetic drug epidemic from taking hold in the Americas,” the study concludes.

Photograph of Rio de Janeiro by Rafael Rabello de Barros via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0

The post South America’s Drug Supply Is Rapidly Becoming More Synthetic appeared first on Filter.

The report focuses on quantitative data for fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine as well as qualitative data for seven novel psychoactive substances (NPS) selected by ONDCP: acetyl fentanyl, carfentanil, ketamine, medetomidine, para-fluorofentanyl, tianeptine and xylazine. Quantitative analysis refers to the concentration of a substance relative to the size of the population using that sampling site, which isn’t necessarily possible for those that are less prevalent or more potent than fentanyl, cocaine or meth. The data represent about 18 percent of the United States population, and according to ONDCP is the country’s largest wastewater drug-monitoring project to date.

After first analyzing the seven NPS by census region, the agency decided to hone in on individual counties where at least six of the seven had been identified.

“Counties where at least six drugs were detected may signal broader polysubstance activity, making them important areas for closer monitoring,” the report states. It also labels counties as “hotspots” for fentanyl, cocaine and meth use.

Similarly, the report points out that medetomidine, para-fluorofentanyl, carfentanil and acetyl fentanyl were identified in all census regions, “signaling potential emerging and re-emerging threats.” But there’s no indication of scale for any of the NPS data, even in the report’s accompanying supplement.

For some states, the data really reflect a single county. Other states have data from up to nine counties. And within the county-level data, there’s no standardization in how many sampling sites were included, or whether multiple sites were spread out versus concentrated in one location. 

The government isn’t required to get the public’s consent to test wastewater because, legally speaking at least, property is no longer private once we’ve thrown it away; it’s the same concept behind why cops don’t need a warrant to go through trash cans on the curb.

Biobot Analytics, the first commercial wastewater-testing company, began contracting with ONDCP in January. (The National Institutes of Health has already been working with Biobot for wastewater drug-testing since 2020.) In May, the new National Drug Control Strategy called for the establishment of a “national wastewater-based monitoring system,” and referenced wastewater testing as a means of confirming AI analyses of emerging drug trends on social media.

Notably, wastewater data doesn’t distinguish between regulated and unregulated versions of a substance. This means that Adderall use, whether prescribed or not, is getting categorized as methamphetamine.

The utility of wastewater testing mostly depends on whether the data is going to public health or to law enforcement. However anonymized the samples might be initially, it’s not difficult for law enforcement to trace the information back to a specific toilet if they really want to.

“Unlike many sources, wastewater is unbiased by household income, race or gender, ensuring equal representation,” Biobot stated in a 2023 blog post about wastewater testing in the context of allocating opioid settlement funds. “With 80 percent of American households and almost all public restrooms included, wastewater analysis offers insights into where substances are used.”

Wastewater itself isn’t biased by income, but it’s harder to say that about wastewater analysis, which is entirely contingent on access to indoor plumbing.

Top and inset images (cropped) via Office of National Drug Control Policy/X.com

The post White House Shares First Data From Wastewater Drug-Testing Project appeared first on Filter.

In my five years of reporting on the global cannabis and psychedelic industries, I’ve seen this growth happen in real time, as the gap between those who can afford legal access and those who remain criminalized widens.

This tension between the fight for just drug policies and the race to profit from potential new markets is one that Koram explores at length in his book. A global review in The Lancet is among other recent contributions to the debate; it found cannabis-related harms to be higher in jurisdictions with commercialized legalization models than in those with decriminalization or other forms of legalization.

In The Next Fix, Koram travels across the globe, visiting some of these jurisdictions, to ask some crucial questions at what appears to be an inflection point in the debate over drug policy reform: What comes next, when the war is over? And who will the real winners be?

I sat down with him to find out. Filter’s interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Prof. Kojo Koram

Sarah Sinclair: Your reflections on your time as a lawyer at Angola Prison, on a former slave plantation in Louisiana, when the first state legalized cannabis, are such a stark portrait of the injustice at the heart of prohibition. Was that the moment when you first knew you had to write the book?

Kojo Koram: Angola is an extreme example, but the United Nations estimates that around 20 percent of the world’s prison population—2.5 million people—are in prison for growing, selling, or possessing the wrong type of drug. For me, that was the moment I realised this system wasn’t delivering what it promised.

I was working in the US when the first states [Colorado and Washington] legalized commercial cannabis markets in 2012. Seeing people imprisoned on a modern-day slave plantation for doing something that, elsewhere, people were now getting licenses for, I think that was the moment I started studying this. Eventually, it led to the opportunity to write this book, travelling from jurisdiction to jurisdiction looking at what actually changes when you implement different drug laws. 

“We could be entering a world in which criminalization and commercialization are happening simultaneously, and I think that raises some real questions.”

SS: In the book, you argue that the debate around drug laws is shifting, to be less focused on whether cannabis should be regulated and more around how. Does that mean the “War on Drugs” is ending?

KK: During the 20th century, when people debated the idea of legalizing drugs, we assumed it was a simple yes-or-no question. Either we legalize drugs, or we don’t. But what we’re seeing in the 21st century is something much more complicated. The debate is around how we might legalize these drugs and how some of the systems of commercialization actually reduce some of the impact of criminalization. But we’re also seeing the potential for criminalization and commercialization happening simultaneously.

In December 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order to reschedule cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, the biggest change in US federal drug policy in the best part of a century. If you’d told a Republican during the Reagan era—when drugs were framed as public enemy number one—that a future Republican president would be signing an executive order to reschedule cannabis and fast-tracking access to psychedelics, they would have thought you’d been spiked. That’s a massive shift, and I don’t want to minimize that. 

But the same month, Trump seized Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela on charges of narcotrafficking. We could be entering a world in which criminalization and commercialization are happening simultaneously, and I think that raises some real questions.

SS: Medical cannabis legislation has shown how legal markets can coexist with continuing criminalization, where many patients can only access treatment if they can afford it while others remain criminalized. Are psychedelic frameworks at risk of repeating the same mistakes? What could an alternative model look like?

KK: In this new psychedelic industry, we’re seeing biotech companies patenting molecules and monopolizing intellectual property. That’s the traditional pharmaceutical model for raising investment to develop these medicines. I visited Australia, which became the first country to legalize prescribed psychedelic treatments [psilocybin and MDMA-assisted therapy] in 2023, but it costs around A$1,000 to access. 

Psychedelics could be one of the most transformative medical advances of the 21st century, given the scale of the global mental health crisis, but if you pick mushrooms from the ground or grow them in your back garden, you could still face criminal consequences. We need to think carefully about how we shape this emerging market to ensure we’re not reinforcing the same structures of exclusion, criminalization and violence upon the communities who suffered most during the War on Drugs.

Within cannabis, we’ve seen very different models of social equity across the US. Some states have pursued highly commercialized models while people continue serving sentences for trafficking offenses. Others, including Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York, have been much more explicit about embedding social equity into legislation. That means expunging criminal records, not just for people currently serving sentences, but for those whose convictions still prevent them from accessing jobs, student loans or travel visas. It means making sure licenses are available to people who were previously excluded from the market, and committing tax revenues to communities that were over-policed, as well as to education and public health. 

These measures can offset some of the risks as these substances become commodified, and can be put in at the point of transition. It’s in the interests of the industry. A century of the War on Drugs has embedded deep fears and stigma around these substances, and a really aggressive commercialized model is just going to facilitate a backlash.

“We have an opportunity to put policies in place that genuinely benefit those on the ground … I think there’s real value in thinking about how we can do this differently.”

 

SS: Perhaps I’m being cynical, but in an ultra-capitalist society, is commercialization inevitable? Or is there still an opportunity to build these markets differently?

KK: I think there’s an opportunity, but that window is closing. The argument needs to be made now. 

One of the industries I compare the emerging cannabis market to in the book is cocoa. Ghana is one of the world’s largest cocoa producers, yet the farmers harvesting those cocoa pods receive only a tiny fraction of the final product’s value. We need to bring together all those working on fair trade, sustainable development and environmental justice initiatives that are trying to intervene in industries like cocoa, coffee and fast-fashion. Cannabis is an entirely new industry and many of its rules haven’t been set yet. 

We have an opportunity to put policies in place that genuinely benefit those on the ground, such as protecting access to land, preventing monopolies over seeds and genetics, and creating protected geographical designations for products such as Jamaican ganja or Moroccan hash, in the same way that Champagne can only come from the Champagne region of France. That is their cultural and financial inheritance. This might be optimistic, but I think there’s real value in thinking about how we can do this differently. 

SS: Some might argue that there is a strong economic argument for a commercial market that generates tax revenue, and surely commercialization is preferable to criminalization?

KK: In the book, I tell the story of a man called Fate Winslow, who was sentenced to life without parole for facilitating a $20 cannabis transaction in Shreveport [Louisiana]. It was his third non-violent conviction. He eventually won his release after 12 years through a series of appeals, but died shortly afterwards. He spent the final years of his life in Angola Prison for facilitating a $20 cannabis transaction. That represents such a profound failure of human rights.

I absolutely recognize that commercialization is preferable to criminalization, but I think we should aim for something much higher than that. We’re living through widening wealth inequality, the devastation of the climate, and huge swathes of the human population being rendered surplus to the actual mechanics of capitalist production. Let’s not just change drug laws, but do it in a way that can mitigate and even repair some of that damage.

“One of the things I wanted to achieve with this book is to help people understand all the different parts of life that drug policy touches.”

SS: In the book, you set out a five-point plan for more fair and equitable regulation. How do we move these ideas from the fringes into mainstream political debate?

KK: For a long time, drug policy has been treated as a niche issue, and other movements have often been reluctant to engage with it because of the stigma. It took organisations like Amnesty International years to adopt a position on ending the War on Drugs, despite the most vulnerable communities being most affected by prohibition. It hasn’t been connected to environmental justice, racial justice or economic justice movements.

One of the things I wanted to achieve with this book is to help people understand all the different parts of life that drug policy touches, from the economy and medicine to the environment and crime. Connecting it to those broader movements will allow for a much more substantive idea of what drug reform might look like, rather than simply handing over a previously prohibited market to a highly commercialized capitalist model.

This is already happening in jurisdictions across the world, but it’s happening in a world where we have rampant wealth inequality, increasing corporate control over technology and infrastructure, and an erosion of living standards for many people. This isn’t the hippie dream of the 1960s, and we need to recognize that when we think about how we can use this moment to make a broader intervention to shape the economy of the 21st century. 

SS: After travelling the world researching and writing The Next Fix, what left you feeling most hopeful about the future of drug policy reform?

KK: What made me most optimistic was how people are using this moment of transition to rethink our relationship with drugs. Humans have been using cannabis and psychedelics for thousands of years, and if the planet survives, we’ll likely be taking them 1,000 years in the future. We’re not going to achieve the drug-free world the UN once promised, so the real question is how we relate to these substances. 

I was really encouraged by models like the cannabis social clubs in Barcelona, which are now being adopted in Germany. If you want something, you don’t just go and buy it, you learn how to grow it, understand different strains, and develop a more thoughtful relationship with what you consume. 

I was also inspired by the conversations around reparative justice, particularly in Colombia, where the War on Drugs wasn’t a metaphor, but a real war. We need a truth and reconciliation process, almost like they had in South Africa, to ensure that this transition benefits Indigenous communities. It’s really exciting seeing examples of reparative justice in how we use technical, legal and financial tools like intellectual property rights or guaranteed ownership within communities that have been overly-policed, to try and transfer wealth to people who’ve been most devastated by the War on Drugs. I was really optimistic to see people thinking about that—and even starting to put it into practice.

Top image shows detail from the cover of The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers Inside the Future of Drugs, to be published by Verso in late July. Images courtesy of Kojo Koram/Verso.

The post Who Will Profit Most When the Drug War Ends? appeared first on Filter.

On June 24, the House Committee on Homeland Security completed its review of HR 8535, also known as the Measuring Illicit Fentanyl Trafficking Act, and sent it forward to the full chamber by a vote of 30-0. It would require Customs and Border Protection and all other DHS entities involved in fentanyl interdiction to “collaborate and share relevant information and data relating to the detection, deterrence, and seizure of fentanyl”; “identify any barriers to sharing relevant information and data”; and “establish performance metrics relating to the detection, deterrence, and seizure of fentanyl.” 

Though this covers department-wide data access and the creation of performance metrics, it doesn’t mention the data collection program itself. It’s not clear whether DHS has yet created it. In response to Filter’s inquiry about the status of the program, an ICE representative stated that for “operational security reasons, ICE does not disclose law enforcement sensitive details.”

“Fentanyl remains the leading driver of drug overdose deaths in the United States,” the office of sponsor Rep. James Walkinshaw (D) stated in April, when HR 8535 was introduced. “Without consistent metrics and coordination across CBP, ICE, and other DHS components, it is difficult to assess what is working and where resources should be directed.”

That announcement was also ambiguous about the data program’s status, stating that the legislation would “ensure full implementation of the assessment program.” This isn’t mentioned in the legislation itself.

Nominally, the goals of DHS fentanyl-related operations are to reduce the supply of fentanyl entering the US and disrupt the market, as well as to disrupt global fentanyl production and supply chains in order “to halt the flow of fentanyl and their precursor chemicals and save lives.”

The mandatory data collection program was imposed via the Department of Defense budget, formally called the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023. It required an accompanying audit by the Government Accountability Office, which in September 2025 revealed that DHS had “limited” ability to understand the actual effects of its actions. 

In 2025, DHS had agreed to get the program up and running, as it was already required to do by law, as well as to implement some sort of internal mechanism ensuring that whoever got stuck with the task of making the program had access to the relevant data from all DHS components, not just their own. It estimated completion by July 31, 2026.

It also agreed to develop its own performance goals and measures—it had been borrowing the National Security Council’s, which are broader—during its annual “measure improvement process,” estimating they’d be ready by October 31, 2026.

The deadline imposed by HR 8535 would be one year from enactment, which would mean late 2027 at the earliest.

On June 24, GAO released a report identifying areas for improvement in DHS border security metrics reporting, which include the volume of drugs seized at ports of entry. It stated that it was not making any new recommendations, as it was still on DHS to implement six out of the eight it had already made dating back to 2019.

Update, July 6: This article has been edited to include comment from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Top image (cropped) via Government Accountability Office. Inset image via Customs and Border Protection.

The post DHS Still Doesn’t Know What Its Fentanyl Seizures Actually Do appeared first on Filter.

On June 21, the AP and Albuquerque Journal published stories about the DEA allowing numerous shipments of fentanyl to move through New Mexico between 2023 and 2025. The investigations stemmed from a 2023 whistleblower complaint filed by DEA Special Agent David Howell, who had been part of the surveillance assigned to some of the shipments.

“We poisoned our community to make cases,” Howell told the AP. “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100-percent got people killed.”

Among other details, the AP described how the DEA’s widely publicized all-time largest fentanyl seizure, a 2025 operation in Albuquerque that resulted in around 3 million seized pills and 16 arrests, came after the agency allowed “millions” of pills to be delivered.

On June 24, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) called for an inquiry into whether the DEA had potentially violated state law. Over the past two-and-a-half years, as the number of United States overdose deaths has gone down, Western states have split off into a separate trajectory that shows fatal overdose going up. The two states where overdose appears to be increasing the most rapidly have been Arizona and New Mexico.

“Shockingly, the federal government stood by while monitoring shipments, tallying exact pill counts, and watching as these deadly drugs hit the streets,” Lujan Grisham stated. “There are no words to describe how reckless and dangerous these decisions were. Make no mistake: the DEA knew people would die if these pills made it into New Mexico communities, and the agency let it happen anyway. The result: hundreds of New Mexican parents burying their kids. Hundreds of New Mexican kids growing up without stable parents. All while the federal government stood by.”

On June 26, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D) formally launched a state-level investigation, stating that it was “deeply disturbing” that DEA agents may have knowingly allowed fentanyl to hit the streets.  

“If those allegations are accurate, the consequences for New Mexicans were not abstract. They were fatal,” he wrote to Lujan Grisham. “I share your outrage.”

Meanwhile, DEA Administrator Terrance C. Cole requested the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conduct an independent investigation, stating that he believed the agency had acted lawfully.

“This request should not be interpreted as reflecting any lack of confidence in the professionalism or integrity of DEA personnel or in the investigative decisions made during this matter,” Cole wrote. “Rather, it reflects my belief that allegations of this nature—particularly those that have received widespread public attention—are best addressed through an independent objective review.”

It’s always possible that some of the shock is genuine, but it’s hard to imagine how. The agency has never really bothered to cultivate an image based on anything other than arrests and reactive enforcement and big-ticket seizures that look good in a photo. Drug interdiction has never been shown to reduce overdose. Often it increases it.

The initial news stories, the subsequent AP spin-off stories, the open letters from elected officials, the new contributions from other media outlets and other elected officials that keep appearing by the day—all of them lean really, really heavily on talking points from the DEA’s “One Pill Can Kill” campaign, more so even than is typical for public discourse around fentanyl. Because in order to be outraged at the DEA for watching any quantity of fentanyl go by without stopping it, you have to validate the myth that seizing fentanyl actually keeps it off the streets.

Gov. Lujan Grisham had specifically asked AG Torrez to prosecute anyone responsible, including federal agents, to which Torrez had responded that no one was above the law although going after federal officers may be unrealistic due to “significant legal barriers.” Administrator Cole, in his letter to the OIG, had stated that “appropriate corrective actions” would be implemented if the OIG ultimately found them necessary, even though he didn’t think that would be the case.

Either way, the DEA still wins. The takeaway is that fentanyl needs to be seized and that when it isn’t, people die. Some government entity therefore must exist to do all the fentanyl-seizing, and it’s going to be the DEA.

Top image (cropped) and inset images of 2025 Albuquerque fentanyl seizure via Drug Enforcement Administration 

The post If the DEA Gets Bad Press for Not Seizing Fentanyl, the DEA Still Wins appeared first on Filter.

The scale of a drug seizure does not correlate to how successfully the government is fighting the drug war. According to the 18th Brazilian Public Security Yearbook, Federal Police cocaine seizures rose from 41.7 tons in 2013 to 72.5 tons in 2023. Across seizures recorded by federal, state and municipal police forces, we also see the same overall trend of quantities getting larger over the years.

The volume of cocaine seized does not matter. It remains a banned substance and so the market remains in the hands of drug-trafficking groups. Lucrative demand is unaffected. If this does turn out to be a record cocaine seizure, what will happen next? Another, larger seizure. More drugs. More records.

The cocaine market is booming. That’s what the gigantic size of these shipments tells us, not how law enforcement has dealt drug traffickers a devastating blow. In 2023, the global cocaine market grew faster than that of any other drug. The market is more geographically adaptive than ever.

Larger seizures can be a sign of stronger enforcement, yes. But it makes more sense that they’re a sign of a growing and resilient supply pipeline. It’s not as if shipments have always been this size, and the government didn’t crack down on them until now. If the record keeps being broken because the market keeps getting bigger, then these seizures are documenting that expansion, not stopping it. 

Seized shipment of cocaine in Honduras, 2014

I am not suggesting that seizures have zero effect. They can create frictions, delays, losses and rerouting costs. But the available evidence gives little support to the fantasy that busts and arrests meaningfully curb the global drug trade. 

“No matter how impressive the seizures look, it makes absolutely no difference to the drug supply,” as former undercover police officer Neil Woods, now of Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP),  said in 2021. “Not only do we never decrease the drug supply, these busts actively increase violence.”  

A 2025 RAND Europe systematic review commissioned by the UK Home Office added more data to support this, finding that drug interdiction is associated more with increased violence than decreased violence.

Policing the drug war just makes it deadlier. The mechanism is not mysterious: Remove product, arrest operators, destabilize distribution chains, and thereby create business disputes. The market reconstitutes itself with more harm than before. The state then presents the next seizure as another sign of progress, as if whack-a-mole were a serious grand strategy.

The Brazilian Federal Revenue Authority and the Federal Police will pat themselves on the back. Cameras will film the timber, the uniforms, the triumphant statements, and sell us the fantasy that this is how violent trafficking groups are defeated. What they will show us is not victory, but the familiar choreography of prohibition: Roll a boulder uphill. Pour water into a sieve. Watch the market adapt. Get more federal funding to do more of the same. This is the wrong answer. It’s high time for a serious discussion on the legal regulation of cocaine.   

Top image via Drug Enforcement Administration. Inset image via Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The post Brazil’s Massive Cocaine Bust Doesn’t Mean It’s Winning the Drug War appeared first on Filter.

“I am going to do everything for our country to save our nation. From danger,” de la Espriella yelled at the audience. “And that danger has a name … narcoterrorism!”

He’s expected to defeat Iván Cepeda, the left-wing candidate endorsed by Colombia’s current president, Gustavo Petro, in the June 21 runoff. He also recently received the endorsement of United States President Donald Trump.

“The results of this Election are very important to the future of Colombia and its relationship to the United States,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “Because of his tremendous accomplishments in life, and his political support for me, personally, it is my Honor to give Abelardo my Complete and Total Endorsement.”

De la Espriella has dual citizenship with the US. He also has a line of somewhat unusual branded products, reminiscent of Trump’s own line of products. He’s marketed rum, menswear products and music albums of him singing hits in “de la Esperiella style.”

While Colombia has collaborated with US efforts to counter the drug trade, President Petro has denounced Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean. So far more than 200 people have been killed in the attacks. De la Espriella has promised to add to that number. He’s called Petro a “criminal” and “drug addict.” 

His platform is a libertarian economic agenda—he promises to take a “chainsaw” to government spending, except the armed forces—coupled with an aggressive, militarized crackdown on the drug trade. De la Espriella’s ascendance represents yet another instance of right-wing ideology surging in Latin America.

A former defense attorney, de la Espriella once represented wealthy businessmen known for drug trafficking. He’s pledged a range of militarized crackdowns if elected, including a vast expansion of private prisons to hold “cockroaches and rats.” 

Trump has called Cepeda a “Radical Left Marxist.”

Inspired by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” de la Espriella plans to build 10 mega-prisons modeled after El Salvador’s infamous CECOT. He’s also promised to deport immigrants who engage in criminal activity; almost all of the approximately 3 million immigrants living in Colombia are Venezuelan. 

“It’s a similar script. A lot of Latin American countries are being overtaken by right-wing forces,” Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Filter. “He’s very Trumpian. And models himself after Bukele. It’s a return to the bad old days.”

Tree noted a historical parallel with former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. 

“He was a strongman,” Tree said. “In the aughts, the country was dominated by paramilitary narco traffickers. It was a horrible human rights environment.”

In the 2000s, Uribe’s military lured thousands of impoverished young men into remote areas, executed them and dressed them in Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) fatigues to falsely boost their body count. De la Espriella has called the former president a patriot. His father coordinated a regional campaign for Uribe, and the families remain close.

Mass incarceration of people who use or sell drugs has never brought the drug trade to an end. Whenever someone is imprisoned, or killed in government air strikes, someone else will take their place. Taking out leadership of transnational drug-trafficking groups just creates a temporary power vacuum, and increases violence between groups and against civilians.

Left-wing rival Cepeda often speaks of the drug war as a failure, and advocates instead for investment in disenfranchised neighborhoods. Trump has called Cepeda a “Radical Left Marxist.”

Image via Wikipedia/Creative Commons 3.0/Trump White House Archives

The post Trump-Endorsed de la Espriella Pulls Ahead in Colombia Presidential Race appeared first on Filter.

The strike came a few days after the release of the National Drug Control Strategy, a sprawling, 195-page document, which—besides some bizarre fear-mongering about marijuana—praises these “kinetic strikes against narcoterrorists,” and promises to expand crackdowns along trafficking routes and within countries that produce or ship drugs.

“There is literally zero evidence that the ‘kinetic strikes against narcoterrorists’ are working,” Dr. David Herzberg, a Buffalo University history professor and drug policy expert, told Filter. “I don’t think it’s useful to try to discern reality based on what the administration says about anything.”

Drug use “can be dangerous,” and the issue is “something we need to be serious about,” he added, “But you can’t be playing cowboy, walking around blowing up boats. It’s how a toddler would handle things.”  

“At best … a few years of a supply chain being disrupted at a massive cost, often only to be replaced by something worse. You’d think at some point that lesson would sink in.”

The Strategy pledges to broaden the fight against trafficking abroad and at the border using artificial intelligence, though despite its length the report does not provide much detail on what AI drug-route tracking would look like. The Department of War is also set to play a bigger role at the border, suggesting further militarization in the drug war.

“Maybe a particular supply chain can be disrupted but at best what you have is winning a few years of a supply chain being disrupted at a massive cost, often only to be replaced by something worse,” Herzberg commented. “You’d think at some point that lesson would sink in.”

He characterized the administration’s plans for more violations of other nations’ sovereignty in pursuit of the drug war as “visiting violence on countries where business enterprises are located that happen to send this product.”

The plan also claims to help people experiencing substance use disorder in the US, primarily through programs that tap into the “healing power of faith.” Although the report also cites science-based approaches to recovery like medications for opioid use disorder, its emphasis is squarely on religious groups and approaches.

“It’s concerning because it involves a belief there’s only one way to be healthy, to ‘salvation’—and we have to be pragmatists about drug use.”

“The United States is, and will always be, one nation under God,” it states. “Over two-thirds of Americans affiliate with a religion, and for the first time, the Strategy is grounded in the healing power of faith for those suffering from drug addiction.”

“Some people are helped by religion,” Herzberg noted. “It should be all hands on deck; I’m not opposed if it works. But, the emphasis on religion above other methods, especially in the context of other comments made by the Trump administration, including RFK, there’s real concern about what they think people who use drugs need,” he continued. “It’s concerning because it involves a belief there’s only one way to be healthy, to ‘salvation’—and we have to be pragmatists about drug use.” 

Pragmatism about drug use means harm reduction, which acknowledges the reality that many people will continue to use drugs, and the need to protect them from associated risks.

Harm reduction also stands against the stigmatization of drug use—not an approach favored by the administration. “The Strategy is a road map for the United States to defeat the scourge of illicit drugs and achieve a safe and healthy America, where a drug-free life is the prevailing norm,” states a White House “Fact Sheet.”

To spread the message that drug use is bad, the administration plans to use influencers and launch what sounds like a revamp of the DARE program. “Prevention in school settings is particularly important, as it helps ensure youth are receiving appropriate and positive messaging to make them more resilient to pressures that can increase the likelihood of drug use,” the document reads.

“This knowledge, you have to think about how it works and who it works for.”

Besides increased use of AI—both to pursue the drug war and to scan medical records to identify people at risk for overdose—one of the few things in the Strategy that hasn’t already been tried and shown to have failed is a plan to test wastewater for drug residue on a national scale.

Herzberg said that in theory, novel ways of gathering information about the drug supply can be used for good—such as for monitoring national and local trends, and being able to warn people and service providers about emerging risks.

“The more information you have, the better,” he said. “But that’s if it’s used to make drug use safer.” 

Given what he’s seen from the administration, he envisions the tech elements as yet more ways to surveil and punish. “This knowledge, you have to think about how it works and who it works for.” 

Herzberg suspects AI will be used to tag travellers as suspicious based on profiling. And the surveillance of medical records could have extremely negative consequences for people who use drugs, like being denied jobs and housing.

“This kind of surveillance is going to most heavily come down on people it always lands on: the most vulnerable,” he said. “The harm caused in the community will come not just from drugs but drug policy.”

Photograph (cropped) via PublicDomainPictures.net

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