Last week the home secretary, James Cleverly, announced that nitazenes are now being treated as class A drugs, his statement bookended with the usual stern rhetoric about the need to keep “these vile drugs off our streets”. The maximum penalty for selling or supplying class As is life imprisonment.
Cleverly’s decision follows the discovery that several victims of deadly drug poisonings had nitazenes in their system. Nitazenes are synthetic opioids, meaning they are similar to the heroin and morphine refined from opium poppies but made entirely in a lab. First developed as painkillers in the 1950s but never approved for medical use, they have been found mixed into heroin to give the low-grade variety of the drug that extra kick, as well as in bootleg Xanax and Valium pills sold on the dark web. Up to 500 times stronger than morphine, even a tiny amount can prove fatal.
