Please note that the “All” series also includes a small number of overdoses involving drugs other than those listed.
The situation in the United States is just as sad as in Mexico, and in this case as well, the main culprit is drug prohibition. Not only has fentanyl caused more deaths than cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin combined, but surveys have revealed that most users in whose bodies fentanyl was detected had no idea they had taken it. It had been sold to them mixed with traditional drugs or was outright passed off as one of those substances. The absence of a strictly regulated market for the aforementioned drugs has thus produced the worst drug epidemic in history.
As the graph shows, traditional drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin—against which governments have been waging war since the late 1960s—were not even the second-largest killer. That distinction belongs to highly addictive and dangerous opioid pain medications that entered the market after a series of scandalous frauds. And because their misuse was eventually curtailed, dependent users transitioned to illegal drugs.
The absurdity of the war on drugs can also be seen in government actions that were supposedly intended to reduce the amount of drugs on American streets. The arrest of drug kingpins and the dismantling of their trafficking organizations clearly produces no effect. Whether organizations such as the Medellín Cartel (primarily focused on cocaine), the Cali Cartel (cocaine), the Herrera Nevárez Organization (heroin), or the Amezcua Contreras Organization (methamphetamine) were destroyed or significantly weakened, no subsequent decline in overdoses followed.
Broad anti-drug initiatives are equally ineffective. They likewise have no long-term impact on the quantity of drugs in the United States, nor on the number of overdoses and users. If they are deemed “successful,” any temporary reduction in supply simply shifts all illegal activity elsewhere.
As a result of Operation Trizo in Mexico, heroin production moved to Asia, while in the 1990s Mexican traffickers took control of the cocaine trade due to the activities of American authorities within the South Florida Task Force. Methamphetamine production then moved entirely to Mexico as well—at the moment when the U.S. government, through legislative changes, restricted access to the chemicals necessary to manufacture this stimulant.