MEXICO CITY — A report launched by the Mexican authorities Friday says the nation is dealing with a dire scarcity of fentanyl for medical use, whilst Mexican cartels pump out tons of the illicit narcotic.
The paradox was reported in a research by Mexico’s Nationwide Fee on Psychological Well being and Addictions. The research didn’t give a motive for the scarcity of the artificial opioid, which is required for anesthesia in hospitals, however claimed it was a world-wide downside.
The fee stated fentanyl needed to be imported, and that imports fell by greater than 50% between 2022 and 2023.
Nonetheless, Mexican cartels seem like having no downside importing tons of precursor chemical compounds and making their very own fentanyl, which they smuggle into the USA. The report says Mexican seizures of illicit fentanyl rose 1.24 tons in 2020 to 1.85 tons in 2023.
A few of that’s now spilling again throughout the border, with a rise in illicit fentanyl habit reported in some Mexican border areas — an issue Mexico paradoxically blamed on the USA.
“Regardless of the restrictions of availability in pharmaceutical fentanyl in our nation, the extreme use of opiates in latest a long time in the USA has had vital repercussions on consumption and provide in Mexico,” the report states.
The report stated that requests for habit therapy in Mexico elevated from 72 instances in 2020, to 430 instances in 2023. That seems like a tiny quantity in comparison with the estimated 70,000 annual overdose deaths in the USA lately associated to artificial opioids. However in actual fact, the Mexican authorities does little or no to supply habit therapy, so the numbers most likely do not mirror the true scope of the issue.
The scarcity of medical anesthetic medication has brought on some actual issues in Mexico.
Native issues with the supply of morphine and fentanyl have led anesthesiologists to accumulate their very own provides, carry the vials round with them, and administer a number of doses from a single vial to preserve their provide.
In 2022, anesthetics contaminated by these practices brought on a meningitis outbreak within the northern state of Durango that killed about three dozen individuals, lots of whom had been pregnant ladies given epidurals. A number of People died due to an identical outbreak after having surgical procedure at clinics within the Mexican border metropolis of Matamoros in 2023.
The response by the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to these twin issues — not sufficient authorized fentanyl, and an excessive amount of of the illicit stuff — has been contradictory.
In 2023, López Obrador briefly proposed banning fentanyl even for medical use, however has not talked about that concept these days after it drew a wave of criticism from docs.
In the meantime, the president has steadfastly denied that Mexican cartels produce the drug, regardless of overwhelming proof that they import precursor chemical compounds from Asia and perform the chemical processes to make fentanyl. López Obrador claims they solely press the drug into capsule type.
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Comply with AP’s protection of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america
