She said the decision to close the methadone factory is linked to the government’s refusal to admit Mexico has a fentanyl problem. In some cases, Strathdee worried, people might try to safely avoid the powerful synthetic by purchasing a weaker opioid such as Percocet or Vicodin, only to find that those pills are actually tainted with fentanyl too.
That, in turn, could lead to a spike in overdoses, not just because of the strength of fentanyl but also because the odds of overdose are much higher after long periods without use. “As a result of that, the government has decided that methadone and other harm reduction strategies are not worthy of pursuit because the number of people affected is so small.” “We’ve known for a while that Mexico is undercounting the number of people using opioids and methamphetamine,” said Steffanie Strathdee, a UC San Diego epidemiologist who studies drug use along the border. González Vaca said 80% of those with fentanyl in their system also tested positive for another drug. In all, 562 tested positive for any so-called drug of abuse, including marijuana. They found that 391 bodies tested positive for methamphetamine. When González Vaca and his team did their testing, they also checked for the presence of other drugs.
Out of 1,106 bodies tested, 250 - or 23% - were positive for fentanyl.īy comparison, in Los Angeles County, an estimated 28% of the 7,137 bodies the medical examiner tested for the drug last year came up positive. So beginning last June, he and his team started performing toxicology tests on nearly every body that came through the morgue in Mexicali - a city of just over 1 million people - regardless of whether it appeared the person’s death was linked to drugs.
MARXICO HELP FULL
González Vaca had a hunch that his country’s official data on fentanyl use wasn’t telling the full story. That means when people die, medical examiners typically don’t find out what substances were in their bloodstream, or whether they were enough to kill. It’s a massive contradiction to what officials say is going on.”īut in Mexico, postmortem drug testing is a rarity. “To say that more than 200 people - of just the people who died in one city - had fentanyl on board really goes against the official narrative of the president saying that nobody uses fentanyl. The new Mexicali data are “a massive statement and finding,” said David Goodman-Meza, a UCLA harm-reduction researcher. It is believed to be the first study of its kind in a nation where medical examiners have traditionally not done toxicology testing, in effect making it impossible to measure the scope of the nation’s drug problem - or even confirm its existence.Īnd it stands in stark contrast to the country’s official statistics, which show that 184 people received treatment for addiction to the drug nationwide in 2021.
The research was led by the director of Baja California’s Forensic Medical Services, who shared the unpublished results with The Times. A novel testing initiative in Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, found that 23% of more than 1,100 bodies sent to the morgue over the last year tested positive for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid as much as 50 times stronger than heroin.
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