He fell asleep alright, and never awoke—dead from a class of opioids called nitazenes.
Opioids are potent, unpredictable and often lethal—heroin, for example, can induce coma or death even in a single dose—but nitazenes are up to 500 times more potent than heroin, and addiction isn’t a prerequisite for dying from them.
“Behind this undercount are people dying suddenly from extremely potent opioids, families left without answers and communities facing a growing but largely hidden toll.”
In the United Kingdom, fatalities from nitazenes are rising at an alarming rate, fueled by the ease of obtaining the drugs through the online encrypted messaging app Telegram. The dealers, largely US-based, often don’t bother to hide what they’re doing: “Nitazenes” appears again and again in chat headings. As with an Amazon order, the buyer will be alerted his drug shipment is on the way, often accompanied by a screenshot of the package tracking information.
According to a new study, the already-troubling figure of 333 nitazene-linked deaths in one year was likely underestimated because:
- Not every death in the UK is subjected to toxicology testing.
- Not all laboratories routinely screen for nitazenes.
- Due to their extreme potency, the minute quantities of the drugs—even if lethal—may be undetectable.
- Nitazenes, by their very nature, degrade swiftly, making a fatal dose hard to detect after the fact in the victim’s blood samples.
Dr. Caroline Copeland, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacology & Toxicology at King’s College London, believes nitazene deaths may have been undercounted by one-third. “Behind this undercount are people dying suddenly from extremely potent opioids, families left without answers and communities facing a growing but largely hidden toll,” she says.
Nicknamed “Frankenstein” drugs, nitazenes can be mixed with tablets or powder. Because they’re cheaply made, they are often used to “bulk out” or replace more expensive substances without informing the customer—who, like Gus, may expect a routine prescription pill but gets a Frankenstein opioid instead.
“They can make their way into the heroin supply chain and Xanax-type drugs that are bought online or through social media,” said drug expert Tony D’Agostino. “The bigger worry is if they make their way into the cannabis market because up to 16 million Brits take cannabis.”
The nitazene flood is no longer coming—it’s here. Police raids in the London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Enfield in 2023 found approximately 150,000 nitazene tablets in a factory set up to make the pills.
Two years ago, a study published in The Lancet Public Health described a perfect storm: Nitazenes’ ease of manufacture combined with the Taliban’s crackdown on Afghan heroin have contributed to the rapid spread of nitazenes across Europe, offering “clear benefits to producers” because they “can be manufactured rapidly and inexpensively, without relying on illicit crops susceptible to eradication.”
The study’s authors issued a grim warning: “Without concerted action, nitazenes could devastate communities of people who use a range of drugs, including those who use drugs infrequently or source … opioid painkillers from the internet.”
Gus was no addict. He just wanted to sleep that night and thought he’d bought oxycodone.
His mother discovered him in the morning, slumped in front of the TV.
“It was so easy for him to die,” she said.
That’s because with nitazenes, you only have to be wrong once.
