WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Senator JD Vance (R-OH) questioned Christopher J. Urben, former Assistant Special Agent In Charge of the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), on the rising threat posed by nitazenes, which can be many times more powerful than fentanyl.
Watch Senator Vance’s remarks here and read excerpts below:
Senator Vance: “When we talk about fentanyl trafficking in particular, I worry a lot that we’re always… a few years behind what’s actually going on in our country. And I think back to my own very personal experience with opioid addiction in my family. Ten years ago, what everyone was talking about was prescription painkillers. But of course, ten years ago prescription painkillers were sort of giving way to street heroin. Then five years ago, everyone was talking about street heroin, but heroin was kind of giving way to fentanyl and now, of course, we’re all talking about fentanyl…
“I wonder whether we’re missing the next thing and I’d like us to maybe get ahead of the next thing. In particular, I’m worried about nitazenes, or “zenes” as it’s sort of commonly called on the street…
“I’ve even talked to people just in the past few days who’ve been able to order this stuff on the Internet. It comes directly to their door, and they’re dealing with a street drug that is substantially more powerful than what we give pregnant women in the hospital who are about to deliver a baby. This is extraordinarily potent stuff for people just to be able to order via mail…
“What do you think about why people might deal drugs? The obvious answer is greed, right? People want to make money. That’s one reason why you might sell nitazenes or fentanyl or anything else. But do you worry that there’s a kind of a national security or national competitive element to this?
“I mean, China’s fundamentally a state-controlled economy. Do you think that they’re aware of what’s going on? Or are we sort of witnessing something like a reverse opium war where they are intentionally allowing this stuff to come into our country because it’s killing 100-120,000 people a year and it’s significantly impairing a lot more than that…
“At the risk of going pretty far out there, given that China is a largely state-controlled economy and it’s not exactly easy to manufacture nitazenes, I wonder if we’re looking at something like a state-sponsor of terrorism argument here where they are explicitly permitting a weapon of mass destruction—a weapon of chemical warfare, effectively—to enter our country.
“Of course, that assumes a lot, some of which I think we should be more careful about. But I really think that we should be worried about how much China knows that it’s destabilizing our country, it’s killing our people, it’s of course doing tremendous damage to our workforce. And we ought to be looking into this and really exerting whatever diplomatic pressure we can on the communist Chinese to stop this stuff.”
For Background:
- The Washington Post: On the streets, opioids sometimes more potent than fentanyl: Nitazenes
- Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost: Warning Issued for Emerging Synthetic Opioid in Ohio1
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