SPECIAL REPORT: Has America’s fentanyl crisis landed in the UK?
The News Agents
Global
4.2 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From coast to coast, America’s towns and cities have been besieged by an opioid epidemic, a crisis which has wrought misery and wielded political consequence.
Deep in the Nevada desert, Las Vegas - a city renowned for its seedy underbelly, has some 1,500 people living in its 600 miles of flash flood tunnels - many addicted to fentanyl. Lewis meets some of the tunnels’ residents to find out how this years-long epidemic is still wreaking havoc and claiming lives.
Despite being insulated from the crisis for so long, British treatment services are sounding the alarm bell. Nitazenes, a family of extremely powerful synthetic opioids, are spiking the drug market with dealers carrying out dangerous experiments on their clients causing overdose after overdose on the streets of Britain.
Has the opioid epidemic, once thought of as a uniquely American problem, now landed in the UK?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.0 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.6 | The opioid crisis is a very American disease. |
| 0:16.8 | Once you've found the right doctor and have told him or her about your pain, |
| 0:21.6 | don't be afraid to take what they give you. |
| 0:24.6 | Often it will be an opioid medication. |
| 0:26.6 | For 20 years, fentanyl, a painkiller, |
| 0:29.6 | hundreds of times stronger than heroin, has gripped American life. |
| 0:33.6 | It has claimed at least three quarters of a million American lives. It shaped politics. |
| 0:44.9 | With the opioid crisis or the drug epidemic we've had throughout the country, it's affected |
| 0:50.4 | almost all of us. It was cocaine. You know, that was the drug of choice. Then heroin and meth made a comeback. |
| 0:58.3 | And now it's fentanyl, it's xizeline, it's car fintinol. |
| 1:02.0 | Synthetic drugs are now the number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 45. |
| 1:08.5 | It has led to the death of 70,000 Americans because of Fintanol. |
| 1:13.7 | If the Bronx was its own state, it would have the second highest amount of opioid deaths |
| 1:18.3 | in the United States. |
| 1:19.5 | Fentanyl is the single largest cause of death among young Americans. |
| 1:24.8 | So many millions of Americans hooked on opiates, hooked on painkillers. |
| 1:29.7 | No part of our society, not young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural, has been spared |
| 1:36.1 | this plague, drug addiction and this horrible, horrible situation that's taken place with opioids. |
| 1:47.9 | It is a failure of politics, a failure of medicine, a failure of law, a darkness which |
| 1:55.2 | is enveloped state after state and place after place. It shows no signs of stopping. It shows no sign of slowing. |
... |
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