Fentanyl adds a deadly kick to the opioid problems in Britain
KINGSTON UPON HULL, England — There was something different in the batches of heroin that circulated through this English port city over the summer, but most addicts had no idea what it was until their friends and fellow addicts, 16 in all, had died of overdoses.
Those who tried the drug described a “warm,” “euphoric” high, followed by a sudden knockout effect, one that has killed dozens of Britons over the past year and left hundreds hospitalized.
The new kick came from fentanyl, an opiate painkiller 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, that was mixed in with the heroin. The drug has killed thousands of Americans, including the rock stars Prince and Tom Petty, but the lethal risk it poses has barely deterred addicts in Kingston Upon Hull, known familiarly as Hull. In fact, many of them cannot get enough of it.
“It makes all the pain go away,” said Chris, 32, a homeless resident of Hull who has been addicted to heroin for more than eight years.
Britain already has Europe’s highest proportion of heroin addicts, and last year, drugrelated deaths hit a record high in England and Wales, with 3,744 deaths mainly from heroin and other opioids. While the scale is small compared with deaths in the United States — where more than 100 Americans die each day from opioid abuse — British authorities fear fentanyl could become the country’s next most dangerous drug.
“People here are prescribed opioids for pain, but nothing to the extent of the U.S., where extremely potent opioids are being prescribed on a large scale,” said Dr. Prun Bijral, the medical director for Change, Grow, Live, a nonprofit organization that focuses on substance abuse. “On the one hand, this is positive. But on the other hand, the U.K. has one of the highest rates of drug-related deaths in Europe.”
No place has been hit harder by heroin, fentanyl and opioid addiction recently than Hull, a former fishing town of 260,000 people about 150 miles north of London that was improbably named Britain’s 2017 “City of Culture.” On a drizzly cold day last month, under a bright green sign welcoming visitors to the city, several addicts lay bundled up, stashes of drugs and alcohol secreted in blankets and other belongings. Others lined the doorways of nondescript buildings on the city’s main street.
Since the fishing industry collapsed in the 1970s, the city has suffered some of the highest rates of unemployment — currently 8.9 percent — and addiction in the country. The city’s easy transport links to the port and two major highways also facilitate drug trafficking.
In recent years, the city has started to bounce back with a series of investments, including a $400 million wind turbine facility and a $30 million research center that aims to develop new treatments for drug addicts.
But Hull continues to catch the most national attention for issues relating to drug abuse. And lately, those miseries have been compounded by fentanyl, which has been blamed for at least 60 deaths nationwide, the National Crime Agency said, and has emerged as a favorite of addicts such as Chris.
On this gloomy day, he was lying in the doorway of a derelict building slumped over a plastic bag of his belongings, his hands furiously shaking.
Chris, who declined to provide his last name because he did not want his family to read about his addiction, said he first tried heroin when he was rejected for a job after two years in unemployment.
“I got so hammered that I took my anger out on my girlfriend,” he said. “I smashed her head in the wall and just left her and went and bought heroin. I’ve been using ever since.”
When he first experienced fentanyl last year, he did not know what he had taken. “I took a shot and it felt like I exploded. It’s dynamite kind of strong,” he said, inadvertently describing why drug experts consider the drug so dangerous.