China’s deadly role in America’s fentanyl epidemic
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
America’s opioid crisis is now in its third decade and has killed more people than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam combined. Fentanyl, the most commonly used synthetic opioid, is up to 50 times stronger than heroin. Made from chemicals manufactured in China, it’s then put into pill form in Mexico and smuggled across the border. As China and the US agree to crack down on the illegal trade, is China deliberately fuelling its rival’s opioid crisis?
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| 1:08.0 | As a result of that, more and more people are going to die. |
| 1:15.0 | The opioid crisis in the US is in its third decade. |
| 1:22.0 | It's not even 1030 in the morning in Huntington, West Virginia, and it's happened again. |
| 1:27.0 | Another overdose, this time just outside a fast food restaurant. |
| 1:31.0 | It's a normal afternoon on the doorstep of San Francisco's main |
| 1:34.6 | government building. An average of one person every 10 hours dies in this city of a |
| 1:40.6 | fentanyl overdose. 50 times stronger than heroin, the synthetic opioid fentanyl, is linked in the US to over |
| 1:48.8 | 70,000 deaths a year. |
| 1:51.8 | The DEA calls fentanyl the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered. |
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