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Isotunitazine is part of a whole group of substances called nitizens. And this tiny amount is enough to kill. Over the past few years, these drugs have been claiming more and more lives across the EU. A perfect storm is brewing, caused by a political power shift in Afghanistan, changing smuggling routes, and the emergence of clandestine Chinese laboratories pushing new and harder synthetic drugs. drugs that are cheaper, sometimes openly available on the clear net, and more potent than almost anything we've seen before. Is Europe ready for what's coming? This is Ahmed. He's a fictional character based in a variety of reporting. And this is his farm located in the northern Helmond region of Afghanistan.
Like many others across the country, he settled a patch of desert. 10 years ago, three hectares cost him just $5,400. Since then, he's gradually turned this patch of arid land into a productive plot that provides for him, his wife, and their nine children. But it wasn't easy. First, the dry earth had to be cleared and leveled. Ahmed doesn't have access to irrigation from a local water source like the Musakala River. So, he also had to dig a 120 m deep well. That cost him $3,600. Instead of relying on expensive diesel fuel to power his pumps, he invested another $10,000 in installing a solar array. He even dug a large pond to store the ground water he'd use on his crops. With the average daily income of an
Afghan farmer being about 5 to10 US, you might well ask, how exactly did Ahmed pay for all this? Well, Ahmed grows poppies. He's the first link in the supply chain that turns this flower into opium and opium into heroin. Since 2003, Afghanistan has consistently produced 70% of the world's opium and up to 90% of Europe's supply. For farmers like Ahmed, it's essential for survival. Every year, he uses 2/3 of his plot to grow poppies. The rest he fills with just enough wheat to feed his family. Most years his crop yields around 140 kilos of opium, including 20 kilos he can set aside for a rainy day. But that's all about to change.
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban returned to power. 7 and 1/2 months later, they make poppy cultivation illegal. Some experts say they're distancing themselves from a trade they previously participated in hope of securing political recognition as well as financial and humanitarian aid. Others claim they're artificially raising prices in order to profit from their own stockpiles. Either way, people in Afghanistan are skeptical. If you don't have enough food in your house and your children are going hungry, what else will you do? If we grew wheat instead, we won't earn enough to survive. This isn't the first time the Taliban have done this. After securing control of the majority of the country in 2000, they put a similar ban in place,
resulting in a 90% reduction in opium cultivation in 2001. Within a year, the price for a kilo of dried opium skyrocketed from $30 US to over 300. But the shortage didn't last. Instead, the United States invaded Afghanistan. The year after that, poppy cultivation bounced back. Having lived through the Taliban's previous rise to power, Ahmed, like many farmers, anticipated the ban. The total area used for poppy cultivation grows by 32%. Farmers are allowed to harvest and sell their opium before a full ban comes into effect. As a result, the 2022 crop is the third largest since records began. Opium stores swell, including Ahmeds.
By November, prices are as high as $475 per kilo. Farmers income from opium sales triples. The UN ODC, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, estimates that opiate stocks in Afghanistan total up to 13,200 tons that year. 60% is likely held by organized crime groups, with the rest belonging to farmers. All in all, it's probably enough to meet the demand for Afghan opiates until 2027. For Ahmed, that's plenty of time to wait for the ban to lift or loosen and for things to go back to normal. For experts in Europe, it's time to jump into action. By the way, Europe uses daylight savings time in the summer. In and of itself, a highly controversial topic. We're out here researching anxietyinducing topics, and the sun is just there, absolutely
offensively bright, right outside at 4:00 a.m. Thankfully, there's Mantleep, today's sponsor. This is a blackout sleep mask. And we cannot stress this enough. 100% blackout. Not kind of, not pretty dark. Fullon complete darkness. It's true. This is Mona, our producer. When she's out shooting for Fern, she sometimes finds herself in three different time zones in 2 weeks. She hasn't slept properly since she crossed into central European summertime. But the Mantis Sleep Mask has adjustable eye cups for zero pressure on your eyes and breathable materials so your face doesn't feel like a tiny sauna. There are lots of great masks to choose from. For example, the classic sleep mask, the Pro, or the Sound Mask. So, for the
first time in weeks, Mona is doing just fine. Wow, I'm feeling so fine. If you want to sleep like a normal person despite the sun's complete disregard for your schedule, go to mantasleep.com and use the code fern10 for 10% off. Hi, I'm Daniel Brahmbaka. I'm the director of the Europe Observatory of Organized Crime at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. We provide analysis to the broader public, to governments, to interested partners about what's happening on the ground in organized crime. For Daniel and his colleagues, Afghanistan's Poppy ban is deeply concerning. Everyone in Europe was
afraid of a potential influx in the traditional heroin market that is linked to Afghanistan with synthetic opioids. In the past, heroin shortages in European countries like Estonia, Hungary or Finland have led users to start consuming synthetic alternatives like fentinyl or cathones. When the heroin supply drops and user demand stays consistent, organized crime groups take advantage of these supply shocks to introduce more profitable drugs. So we thought okay we have to look into this issue and we need to monitor elicit markets to see do synthetic opioids actually show up there. Have they maybe already entered supply chains uh for elicit drugs in Europe and what are the
dynamics behind this market if there is any market already. While many questions remain one thing becomes clear. This ban is different. The Afghan poppy industry doesn't bounce back like it did the first time. Ahmed's home province of Helmand, which accounted for over half of Afghanistan's poppy cultivation, is rendered virtually poppy free. Europe's heroin supply is almost entirely cut off at the source. At this point, you might assume that Europe's drug scene would be flooded with synthetic alternatives, but the flood never comes. So, the heroine market has actually never been sustainably disrupted. Massive herin
markets like here in Germany are still readily supplied most probably because of existing stockpiles of heroin and opium that you would have in Afghanistan and along the traditional trafficking routes. Stockpiles of opium from farmers like Ahmed are softening the blow. Heroin purity in Europe has generally plummeted and can range from 5 to 40%. But prices and availability have remained relatively stable. So far there's no sign of a drastic impact like the ones experts warned about. But that shouldn't create a false sense of security. There's a lot of guessing around that. But let's say if herin continues to be scarce and maybe the stock piles are depleted at some point, then yes, we may have a way stronger impact than we would think of now.
So we asked ourselves, what happens if the situation gets worse? Compared to the US, Europe hasn't had an opioid crisis. The first wave of the American epidemic was supply driven. It started when pharmaceutical opioids like Oxycontton were aggressively marketed and overprescribed. The second wave came when these prescriptions were largely cut off, pushing former patients to start using heroin. This snowballed into the third and deadliest wave when fentinyl entered the drug supply. Europe largely avoided this path through stricter prescription practices, stronger, more socially oriented healthcare, better treatment, and harm reduction services. For over three decades, fentinel's presence in Europe
has remained small and geographically limited. But now there are new challenges. It looks like Afghan heroin isn't coming back, and flexible competitors are quick to fill the gaps. Clandestine drug labs in China, India, and Russia produce an array of synthetic opioids. Drugs like fentinyl and nitizens. At least 21 EU member states have already found nitizens in their drug supply. Nitzines often contaminate drugs like heroin or oxycodone and sometimes more common drugs like cocaine, Xanax, ketamine, and ecstasy. In the UK, they've even been found in vape liquids and illegal nasal sprays. So far, relatively few deaths seem to be linked
to nitizens, just a few hundred in most countries, but these numbers might not be entirely accurate. In Germany, last year and this year, we have had the historically highest numbers of overdose death. These numbers are far away from what has happened in the US. But still they are high comparatively but then if you only conduct an autopsy in 50% of the cases and that has been the case in Germany then how do you actually know what people took? The opioid quick scan would not differentiate or would not tell you this was herin or this was oxycodone or this was neazy. So we don't actually know how it's going. In September 2024, the director of the European Agency for Drugs issued a call
to action. He explicitly warned against the very real risk of remaining complacent during this buffer period. Without a visible crisis like the one in the US, governments aren't forced to prepare. This false sense of security is only made worse by the novelty of nitizens. Substances that most experts don't know they should test for or how to effectively treat. Names that most people, including you, have probably never heard before this video. Drugs that seemingly came out of nowhere. Or did they? This is the pharmaceutical research laboratory of chemical company SIBA in Basil, Switzerland. Here, chemists are experimenting with a largely unexplored compound, benzimdazzole. It was first synthesized in 1872, but its therapeutic
potential wasn't recognized until the 1950s. Intrigued by the compound, the SIBA team conducts some novel experiments. They focus on creating benzyazol derivatives as opioid painkillers. They take a benzyazole ring as a scaffold and bind an ethylamine at its first position and a benzel group at its second position. This way they produce two benzylbenzole. With only minor structural modifications to this scaffold, the chemist can produce a wide variety of analog substances. That means they each have a unique chemical structure but potentially similar effects. The team has successfully synthesized a new class of opioids, broadly labeling them nitizens. But they quickly realize there's a
problem. The chemists conduct a toxicity test. They test how many milligs of morphine per kilo of body weight is needed to kill half a test population of mice. It's 200 mg. Then they conduct the same test using the nitazine compound. A 1 mgram dose does the job. The drug they've created is 200 times more potent than morphine and 5 to 10 times more potent than fentinyl. Some analoges are over 40 times more potent. The team agrees that this extreme potency makes it especially difficult to dose. This leads to what the medical field calls a narrow therapeutic window. One small miscalculation and the patient could become addicted or die.
Its unique chemical structure further complicates medical use as it behaves differently than other opioids. When certain analoges like isotinazine degrade in the body, they release an active metabolic compound in the brain that's even more potent than the parent drug, meaning the drug's effects last an unusually long time and intensify before fading. But that's not all. The molecule unbinds very slowly from the opioid receptors in the brain. In turn, nazines have a reduced sensitivity to life-saving drugs like nlloxxone. Nlloxxone is a compound typically used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. It does this by displacing the opioid molecule at the brain's receptors, and it's effective for
morphine, heroin, and even fentinyl. But nitizens make this process mechanically difficult, and multiple doses are often required to stop someone from slipping back into overdose. Simply put, it's stronger, harder to treat, and it lasts much longer than other opioids. The scientists shelve the project. Netazines are never approved for medical use. The findings are published in medical journals, which fade into scientific obscurity. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for seven decades, Nitzines passed out of all knowledge until 2019. The opioid epidemic in the US has been fueled by an influx of precursor chemicals coming from China. They're usually transported to Mexico where they're turned into fentinel and
smuggled over the border. Trump has blamed the Chinese government for the crisis and partially used it to justify higher and higher tariffs. They are doing that. Yes. But they are paying right now 20% tariff because of fentinel based on the fact that they're sending fentinel to Mexico and Canada. The CPC claims fentinel is an America problem. Some fentinyl analoges were banned in 2015 and a more complete ban followed in 2019. That year, China added fentinyl, its analoges, and a variety of precursor chemicals to their list of controlled
substances as an act of good faith. On paper, this was a good move. But in practice, it meant that the companies making fentinel were pushed into a perpetual cat-and- mouse game with the government. If they couldn't sell fentinel anymore, they simply had to look for new unregulated synthetic drugs. This is a clandestine drug lab in Jangju, China. These chemists are poking around in old medical journals trying to find new opioids they can synthesize. Eventually, they stumble on papers about nitizens, which tick all the boxes. It's a largely unheard of compound. It's easy to synthesize and it's extremely potent. And more importantly, it's not yet banned by the government. They've struck synthetic gold. Within a few months,
small packages of nitizenine analoges start hitting countries all around the world. So, just how easy is it to buy one of the most dangerous drugs on Earth? We wanted to find out. Warning, do not try this at home. Step one, do 15 minutes of research to find an article that mentions online B2B marketplaces with potential listings from Chinese vendors selling nitizens. Step two, go to the B2B platform and search for nitizens. See that the listings with the keyword have been removed. Step three, search for knowing it's a common analog found on the street. Immediately find listings for multiple vendors. Step four,
download Telegram and contact the number listed on the photo of a bag of nondescript drugs. Step five, within 12 hours, get an answer. How much you want to buy? smiley face. Clarify that you want to order a test sample and have it shipped to Europe. Step six, find out that it will cost $160, including shipping with either UPS, FedEx, or DHL. Step seven, send them an address and pay with their link. Congratulations, you've now bought one of the most powerful opioids in the world. And if by any chance your package is intercepted, there's a rehipment guarantee. Five stars on the flag, five stars for the customer service. We didn't do that last step, by the way. So, the stuff never
arrived. But we were casually offered kilos of isotinazines by this vendor. Enough to harm a lot of people. Europe seizes maybe 10 to 20 kilos a year, while at the same time we seize 400 tons of cocaine a year. That's a big difference. But still, with 10 kilos of nitzines, you could kill the whole city of Berlin. The kilo we could have bought easy peasy could theoretically kill well over a 100,000 people. By 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime was tracking 26 distinct nitizen analoges in 30 countries around the world. And just like fentinel in the US, nitizens are likely here to stay. or they might be replaced by yet another
novel substance. As the game of cat-and- mouse continues, substances are declared illegal, so labs look for new unregulated alternatives. For organized crime groups, the upside of selling potent synthetics is simply too high. Trafficking 1 kg can be equivalent to trafficking 50 kg of heroin. Shipments automatically become smaller, which makes them easier to hide in the mail. And it's more than just logistics. Once criminal organizations invest in synthetic opioid infrastructure and expertise, economic logic suggests they won't go back to the less efficient, higher risk and lower margin heroin trade. On top of that, synthetic opioid production isn't affected by agricultural vulnerabilities. No weather patterns, no growing seasons, no
political instability in source countries. Production can happen year round in clandestine laboratories, and you can set those up just about anywhere using precursor chemicals sourced from the global chemical industry. Even if the Taliban lifted their ban and Afghan opium production rebounded, the superior profitability of synthetics would likely win out. So, is Europe prepared? Let's start with law enforcement. Currently, their focus is elsewhere. Cocaine was basically conquering all over Europe. So, everyone was very afraid about cocaine. If you want to put it like briefly, you would say European
law enforcement authorities were looking west, right, to where the cocaine's coming from, but not looking east where opioids are coming from in heroine. Without bodies piling up because of synthetic opioids, there's little incentive for law enforcement to allocate significant resources to stop them. And when you compare, for example, seizures, right, seizures are always a good expression of not what's actually happening, but a good expression of law enforcement priorities. Last year in Germany we have I think 24 tons of cocaine being seized but 140 kilos of heroin. That is very small number if you consider the size of the German heroin
market but it's simply because no one was looking for it. So when you they would look for it they would find it. Even if it was a priority it's unclear how much of the synthetic opioid supply law enforcement could realistically curb. Picture an hourglass. At each stage, the width of the hourglass represents how many people are involved. At the top, hundreds of thousands of farming households grow cocoa plants, mostly in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Then the funnel narrows. Far fewer people refine cocoa leaves into cocaine. Fewer still are the smugglers and top level importers who move it into consumer countries. This is the bottleneck. At the bottom, the hourglass widens back out. The number of
wholesale dealers increases, and they branch out to countless street level sellers. Each hand it passes through increases the drug's price until finally it reaches the consumer. But synthetic opioids like nitizens are reaching users in much more direct ways. Is important to understand that this is not the traditional organized crime you may have in mind. Running this market with synthetic opioids. This is not like Dangeta or Mexican cartels or Colombian cartels. This is mostly an online phenomenon. So this market only becomes physical the moment the drug reaches the user. It's shockingly easy to order these substances online. So easy that it flattens the supply chain almost entirely. Producers in China mail small
packages directly to street level dealers and even end users. when basically the whole supply is coming by mailing shipment somewhere from China within millions of parcels coming from China every day to Europe and you're looking for what like 100 g of fentinil or even a kilo of nazines it's impossible this also means that doors open to an entirely new kind of end user there is a risk and there's a growing risk that on these basically a completely uncontrolled online markets, these substances find their way into drug user communities and especially non-traditional drug user communities. So, it's young people that are very absent from these traditional street markets for heroin that we have had in Europe. According to Dr. Ara Christian
Schoolberg from Oslo University Hospital in Norway, there have been multiple cases of young people ordering a pill online to check it out, taking it in their room, and being found dead by their parents. Synthetic opioids like nitizens are sometimes bought and used knowingly, often by experimental users who like to try new highs. But often nitizens are simply hidden in other substances. Users seek out prescription medications like Oxycontton or Xanax, which they assume were produced by pharmaceutical companies. Dealers take advantage of this trust to create and sell counterfeit pills which don't contain these drugs at all. But why would they do that?
Why would you even contaminate or why would you even lace another product with something so potent that there's risk of actually killing your customers especially if they have a very low tolerance for opioids. And the question is not so easy to answer and it's a lot of guessing. But we assume that basically with a very little amount of a synthetic opulazines, you can convert an incredible high amount of useless cheap material into a highly potent drug. In short, it's cheap. Press a bunch of junk with a teeny tiny amount of some nitizen analog and tada, you have pills that get people crazy high. If one of these pills contains just a few saltsized grains too much, it's instant death. But hey, the margins, oh man,
drug busts and arrests often do little to curb supply or improve the health of us or communities. That's where prevention, treatment, and education come into play. On the streets, heroin users are being effectively warned about contaminated drug supplies thanks to the work of harm reduction services. Every time there is a batch of heroin that is contaminated, there's warnings, there's information. Basically, traditional heroine user community is a street level community and it's accessible for street workers for information for awareness raising. So, that works quite well. But these services aren't available everywhere and they're rarely able to help users who buy their drugs online from the privacy of their bedrooms.
Across Europe, drug consumption rooms, needle clinics, and substitute programs are somewhat accessible, but still limited. They're known to help traditional drug users, but they won't be as effective for a teenager who buys an anti-anxiety pill online, accidentally encounters nitizens, and immediately overdoses. Another challenge is to fight the current blind spot in detection. Toxicology tests used across Europe were designed to detect traditional opioids like heroin, but nitizens are structurally distinct, meaning standard screenings simply don't register them.
Conventional fentinol test strips are equally useless. Postmortem examinations also routinely miss nitizens. This leads health officials to underestimate their presence until a series of suspicious deaths forces a closer look. Beyond detection, Europe needs modern alarm systems. Wetonos in Wales and the Loop in England test drugs that are sent in anonymously and provide alerts about contaminated batches. These services are accessible to the public, but even today relatively few people use them. Some countries have started to deploy wastewater analysis as an early warning system. They use it to detect nitine metabolites in communities hopefully before overdoses occur. But these services remain rare and isolated to a
handful of nations. Another challenge is getting first response drugs like Nlloxxone into the hands of the public. It's less effective against nitizens than it is fentinyl, but it's still crucial to saving lives. Over-the-counter nlloxxone is available in only five countries. Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden, and most recently Germany. In all others, it's only available with a doctor's prescription. So far, fewer people have access. At the end of the day, there's a lot more to be done. Most emergency services haven't adopted nitizen specific treatment protocols. Law enforcement still lacks the intelligence infrastructure to intercept small packages in the mail. And perhaps most critically, awareness campaigns have
largely failed to reach nonopioid users. Not enough young Europeans know about this trend. They simply don't know that a pill or powder they order somewhere online could be laced with a ridiculously deadly labmade substance. There is a silver lining. Experts like Daniel and his colleagues are on a mission. What we do as an organization, we make organized crime visible. We research it. We report about it in order to bring it to the attention of the broader public to governments to authorities in order to bring it on the agenda in order to trigger reactions in making basically the life more complicated for organized crime because in a setting where they're invisible, they're living their best life and we want to change it.
One thing we can all do is help to raise awareness. If you know someone who might be at risk, make sure they know about the dangers of nitizens. Tell them to get their drugs tested if they can. If they go to certain parties, tell them to carry nlloxxone whenever possible. And of course, there is help out there for people who struggle with substance abuse. Find links in the description.
