MEXICO CITY — A report released by the Mexican government on Friday says the country faces a dire shortage of fentanyl for medical use, even as Mexican cartels pump out tons of the illicit narcotic.
The paradox was reported in a study by Mexico’s National Commission on Mental Health and Addictions. The study did not give a reason for the shortage of the synthetic opioid, needed for anesthesia in hospitals, but said it was a global problem.
The commission said fentanyl had to be imported and that imports fell by more than 50% between 2022 and 2023.
However, Mexican cartels appear to have no problem importing tons of precursor chemicals and manufacturing their own fentanyl, which they smuggle into the United States. The report says Mexican seizures of illicit fentanyl increased from 1.24 tons in 2020 to 1.85 tons in 2023.
Some of this is now spreading across the border, with a rise in illicit fentanyl addiction reported in some Mexican border regions – a problem that Mexico has paradoxically blamed on the United States.
“Despite limitations on the availability of pharmaceutical fentanyl in our country, the excessive use of opioids in recent decades in the United States has had important repercussions on consumption and supply in Mexico,” the report states.
The report states that requests for addiction treatment in Mexico have increased from 72 cases in 2020 to 430 cases in 2023. That seems a minuscule number compared to the estimated 70,000 annual overdose deaths in the United States in recent years linked to synthetic opioids. . But in reality, the Mexican government does very little to provide addiction treatment, so the numbers probably don’t reflect the true scale of the problem.
The shortage of medical anesthetic medications has caused some real problems in Mexico.
Local problems with the availability of morphine and fentanyl led anesthesiologists to purchase their own supplies, carry vials with them, and administer multiple doses from a single vial to conserve their supply.
In 2022, anesthetics contaminated by these practices caused an outbreak of meningitis in the northern state of Durango that killed about three dozen people, many of whom were pregnant women who received epidurals. Several Americans died from a similar outbreak after undergoing surgery at clinics in the Mexican border city of Matamoros in 2023.
The response of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration to these twin problems – a lack of legal fentanyl and an excess of illicit substances – has been contradictory.
In 2023, López Obrador briefly proposed banning fentanyl, even for medical use, but has not mentioned this idea recently, after it sparked a wave of criticism from doctors.
However, the president vehemently denied that Mexican cartels produce the drug, despite overwhelming evidence that they import chemical precursors from Asia and carry out the chemical processes to produce fentanyl. López Obrador claims that they only make the drug into pill form.
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