Drug markets: the replacement of agriculture by chemistry

Labs are replacing fields as the source of addictive drugs. Here are two stories, from National Affairs, and the Financial Times.

The current issue of National Affairs has this essay on drugs, drug use, and overdose deaths:

How to Think about the Drug Crisis by Charles Fain Lehman

"A reported 111,219 Americans died from a drug overdose in 2021. That figure has risen more or less unabated, and at an increasing pace, since the early 1990s. Back in 2011, 43,544 Americans died from a drug overdose — less than half the 2021 figure. Ten years earlier, in 2001, it was 21,705 — less than half as many again. And the problem keeps getting worse: The 2021 figure is nearly 50% higher than it was in 2019.

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"The National Center for Health Statistics estimates that there were roughly 110,000 overdose deaths in the year ending December 2022 — essentially unchanged from a year earlier.

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"Historically, illicit drugs — heroin, cocaine, marijuana, etc. — were derived from plants grown in fields or greenhouses. But licit pharmacology has long been able to use simple, widely available precursor chemicals to synthesize the active ingredients in these substances. This sidesteps the complex processes of farming altogether. At some point in the past several decades, drug-trafficking organizations learned to use the same techniques at scale. Using precursors sourced primarily from China, they now synthesize a variety of opioids — the class of drugs that includes heroin.

"The most widely known of these is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid conventionally used in anesthesia that is 50 times stronger than heroin. Some are stronger still — carfentanil, the most potent opioid known thus far, is roughly 100 times stronger than fentanyl. In 2021, synthetic opioids were involved in roughly two out of every three overdose deaths.

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"Complicating the story further is the increasing purity and declining cost of methamphetamine, another synthetic drug with an exploding death rate. After synthetic opioids, methamphetamine is now the second most common cause of drug overdose death. It's also the only tracked drug where deaths not involving synthetic opioids are increasing. That these two lab-produced substances are replacing "organic" drugs at the same time is not a coincidence.

"Why have these drugs taken over the market? Because they're a much better value proposition for sellers. Synthetic drugs significantly reduce production costs, both because chemistry is less labor- and input-intensive per unit produced than farming and because lab production is much easier to obscure from interdiction efforts that drive up costs. Furthermore, because the potency per dose is higher, drug-smuggling operations can move a smaller amount of fentanyl than heroin for the same profit.

"Of course, the stronger the drug, the higher the risk of overdose. Drug-overdose death rates used to be low in part because for the first century or so of modern American drug use, the potency of illicit drugs was constrained by what traffickers could grow in a field. Synthetic drugs remove this limit."

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And this from the FT:

How fentanyl changed the game for Mexico’s drug cartels.  by Christine Murray

"In the last decade, fentanyl has become the leading cause of death for young adults in the US. Mexico’s illegal drug trade has also adapted to the shift from plant-based drugs towards synthetics, creating a new, streamlined and highly profitable arm of the illicit business with fewer workers and lower costs — but just as much violence.

"The change has caused friction in two of Washington’s most important relationships, with China and Mexico.

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"Instead of employing tens of thousands of agricultural labourers, the entire fentanyl industry in Mexico could function with “cooks” estimated to number in the hundreds, who were mostly not qualified chemists, Reuter said. Fentanyl’s growth appears to have hit heroin production in particular, with poppy growing in Mexico still well below its peaks, according to the UN Office for Drugs and Crime."