From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow F. This is the Daily.

Just as America is beginning to wrap its arms around the fentanyl crisis, a new kind of drug

epidemic is emerging. It's faster, more addictive, and far more lethal. And what's driving it

are new types of synthetic drugs, substances that can be made almost anywhere, altered endlessly,

trafficked easily, and then consumed in just about any form imaginable.

Today, my colleague, Asim Ahmed, explains how these deadlier drugs are beginning to take hold

and brings us inside one effort to do something about it.

It's Tuesday, May 26th.

Awesome. Welcome to the Daily. It's wonderful to have you here in New York.

Well, thank you for having me.

You are here not only because you have won multiple awards for your investigations.

This is true. You can't deny it. Not only because you are, I think it's fair to say, a foreign correspondence, foreign correspondent, but because you are in the middle of truly mind-blowing reporting on the new world of synthetic drugs. And I think this is something that none of us, even me, who,

you know, I have a special interest reporting experiences in this world, really understood

until you started to break these stories. So I want to just start

with how you got to this. What drew you in to these stories? You know, obviously we work

together in Mexico and in Mexico, you're constantly looking at the repercussions of the war on

drugs. Yep. You're looking at countless lives lost.

You're looking at, you know, inordinate amounts of drugs, fentanyl moving north into the United States.

You kind of see the mechanism of failure up close.

And we all know the war on drugs has failed.

We also know, like, it not only failed, it kind of made things worse.

And you realize fentanyl meth, two of the first sort of synthetic drugs were out there.

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