At least thirteen deaths, and dozens of serious poisonings. These are all Dutch victims of nitasenes, a new group of opioids that can be fatal in minimal quantities. Erasmus MC came up with those figures on Friday after an inventory at the request of NOS. This is probably a significant underestimate, because poisonings are not always investigated.
Nitazenes are often stronger than fentanyl, surpassing them in terms of lethality. Two men will appear in court on Monday who were involved in the webshop Slaap Pills.net. The police tracked them down after the nitasen-related death of 44-year-old Sharon from Voorburg. The pair are being prosecuted for involvement in the trade in medicines and prohibited substances. The Public Prosecution Service is investigating more perpetrators.
“It is not surprising that people have been misled,” says forensic drug expert Jorrit van den Berg. “People order tablets that are supposed to be the painkiller oxycodone, for example. The logo has been exactly copied. But in fact it is a nitazene.”
Treacherous
Van den Berg works at the Narcotics Department of the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). Since April last year, his team has found nitasenes ten times in cases involving pills or powders, often supplied by the police for investigation. The danger is not recognizable from the outside, it concerns pills with different colors (such as green or blue) and different logos.
According to the Dutch Forensic Institute, nitazenes can be up to a thousand times stronger than morphine
Nitasenes have not yet been found in drugs in the Netherlands. That seems like a matter of time: abroad they have been found in heroin, cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy, even in vapes and illegal nasal sprays.
The treacherous thing about nitasenes lies in the small amounts that can be fatal. According to the NFI, they can be up to a thousand times stronger than morphine. The Narcotics Division has so far discovered five different variants of nitasenes, the same basic molecule but with a slightly different chemical structure. “We mainly find variants of nitasenes that are even stronger than fentanyl,” says Van den Berg. “Nitazenes can be fatal in minimal quantities. Less than a milligram, a thousandth of a gram.”
Nitazenes are substances that fall under synthetic opioids. They were developed in the 1950s as a possible painkiller. But they have never been marketed as medicine. “Research was stopped because of the severe side effects,” said Van den Berg. “People can have difficulty breathing, causing a lack of oxygen. They can experience pressure in the chest. They can become unconscious.”
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It is unknown how the substance group found its way into the illegal medicine circuit decades later. “People who wanted to market a highly effective drug may have looked in old scientific literature,” Van den Berg thinks. It is therefore unknown what a suitable dosage is. “That is not known from pharmaceutical research.”
Illegal web shops
Due to the low doses in the counterfeit pills, it is extra challenging for the NFI Toxicology team to investigate whether there are nitasenes in the blood after poisoning or death. This is possible with new analysis techniques, even though the measured concentrations in the blood are extremely low, comparable to one gram in a million liters of water.
People who order painkillers from illegal online shops do so, for example, if they have previously received addictive painkillers on prescription from a hospital or GP. If they can no longer get a repeat prescription, they turn to these types of platforms. The pills were delivered to your home via regular delivery services (such as PostNL).
The outgoing cabinet plans to ban all nitazenes under the Opium Act. Nitasenes are also causing many victims in other countries. In the United Kingdom, the crisis with nitazenes is greater and several hundred people have already died from the substance. “It has never been so dangerous to use drugs,” he said warned Britain’s National Crime Agency. The substance also kills many people in the United States, and in Australia, Sierra Leone and Liberia, for example.
Out research of Wall Street Journal it turned out that nitazenes are openly sold on Chinese marketplaces. The newspaper also found almost a hundred profiles from the Pakistani marketplace TradeKey where different variants of nitasenes were sold, including a variant that the newspaper said is potentially fifteen times more powerful than fentanyl.
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