As heroin in Afghanistan dries up, Europe could face an overdose crisis like the U.S.

For anyone living in America, the nightmarish shift in a contaminated drug supply is all too familiar. “The heroin market seemed to have been prepared for the first year of the Taliban ban: there was enough heroin in circulation and stocked up to dampen any supply shocks,” explained Andre Gomes, head of comms for the British charity Release, which provides legal advice on drug cases. “Compared to North America, synthetic opioids play a relatively small role in Europe’s drug market overall, but feature prominently in the opioids market in the Baltic countries,” a representative of the European Union Drugs Agency wrote in an email. We know there’s a backlog of reported cases in coroners offices, meaning that real figures for nitazenes deaths are only going to be revealed later this year and the next.” Mat Southwell is a harm reduction worker in Bath, a small city in southwest England where one up-and-coming dealer was recently arrested for selling nitazenes-laced heroin. That's not going to be impacting now — it takes at least 18 months to two years for that crop to work its way through … At the moment, the police are able to take out pretty quickly, but once it starts to hit higher in the chain, and then once people are suddenly going ‘we’ve got no heroin’ — that's the moment we're all looking at with super fear.” When it comes to synthetic opioids, China is the new Afghanistan thanks to its vast, loosely-regulated chemical industry subsidized by Beijing.