The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
U.N. commission takes steps in fentanyl fight
The United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs is taking a step to help prevent fentanyl’s deadly rise.
The surge of fentanyl over the past few years has killed thousands in the United States, with Ohio among the hardest hit by the opioid.
Now the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs is taking a step to help prevent fentanyl’s deadly rise.
On March 16, the commission scheduled two fentanyl precursors and a fentanyl analogue.
“Scheduling substances enables greater control and monitoring of the necessary precursor chemicals ensuring a concerted international approach built on the close cooperation of all the parties to the international drug control conventions,” the commission stated in a news release. “It unifies action and replaces the patchwork of different local approaches to the problem.”
For example, authorities must be contacted if “unusual orders or transactions that might allow the precursor chemical to be diverted for illicit manufacturing of narcotics” are detected.
While the United States has seen the brunt of fentanyl overdose deaths, the drug and its analogues have also contributed to deaths in countries around the world from Finland to Australia to Morocco.
“Fentanyl is a good medicine but a bad drug,” said Justice Tetty, chief of the Laboratory and Scientific Section at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. “It has excellent pain relieving properties, but is liable to abuse and can rapidly lead to dependency.”
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, fentanyl is the strongest opioid available for medical use by humans. It has 100 times the potency of morphine.
“It is highly valued for its analgesic and sedative effects and widely used in the management of severe pain and in anesthesia,” the report states.
Commonly prescribed in transdermal patches or lozenges, it can be “diverted from its medical applications and misused by removing the gel contents from patches and injecting or ingesting the drug, or compressing it into pill form,” according to a report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. U.S. doctors wrote 6.65 million fentanyl prescriptions in 2014.
Though there is some pharmaceutical fentanyl being diverted from the legitimate market, the DEA said that makes up “only a small portion of the fentanyl market” in the U.S. A majority of the illicitly used fentanyl in this country comes from China.
“China is a global source of fentanyl and other illicit substances because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored,” the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report states. “Chinese law enforcement officials have struggled to adequately regulate thousands of chemical and pharmaceutical facilities operating legally and illegally in the country, leading to increased production and export of illicit chemicals and drugs.”
The U.S. and China have worked together in recent years to address the problem. Most recently, China agreed to ban the large animal sedative carfentanil, which is 100 times more potent than fentanyl. That ban went into effect March 1.
There are about 20 fentanyl-related substances on China’s controlled substance list, but two of the most common precursor chemicals were not yet among them.
In October 2016 thenSecretary of State John Kerry asked for those two chemicals to be added to the list of controlled substances under the 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.
Those two substances, 4-anilino-N-phenethylpiperidine (ANPP) and Nphenethyl-4-piperidone (NPP), were the precursors scheduled March 16. The other substance scheduled is butyrfentanyl, a potentially deadly fentanyl analogue.
China is bound to abide by the commission’s ruling as it is an original signer to the 1988 UN Convention.
“The primary goal of the international drug control conventions is to protect the health and welfare of human kind,” said Ambassador Bente Angell-Hansen, who chaired the Commission on Narcotic Drugs session. “This is why it was so important to get those precursors and the analogue under international control.”