No Family is Immune to This Plague
Heather Knight wrote: It was a tense Tuesday morning in San Francisco when Christina LaCour went to her son’s bedroom to wake him for school. The door was locked, but she managed to break it open. Inside, she found her son lying on his bed, his face turning blue, his veins bulging, while a black liquid oozed from his nose and mouth onto the sheets. She quickly retrieved two doses of Narcan, which she kept in a kitchen drawer in anticipation of this very moment she had long feared, but the drug failed to revive him. She wept and screamed in anguish while calling emergency services. Her usually charming apartment turned into a hazy gray scene filled with paramedics, police officers, and forensic experts. She watched in horror as her son’s body was placed in a plastic bag for autopsy.
She was certain her son had died from the opioid fentanyl, but the autopsy report did not mention it. Instead, it included a term entirely new to her: cyclophane. This was the first time this substance appeared in a San Francisco medical examiner’s report. Research revealed that the unknown drug that took her son’s life—confirmed later by police at a press conference held to warn about its emergence—is a synthetic opioid more potent than fentanyl, which was still claiming dozens of lives in the city each month. Cyclophane is part of a new group of deadly drugs flooding the illicit drug market and confounding cities that had just begun to gain control over the fentanyl crisis, the latest victim of which was the beautiful American singer and actress Hayden Panettiere, 36.
Cyclophane can be manufactured by amateur chemists anywhere, is difficult to trace, and its effects on the human body are harder to reverse or counteract. Experts indicate that cyclophane is ten times more powerful than fentanyl. While test strips can detect fentanyl, they cannot detect cyclophane. Reversing the effects of this new drug may require multiple doses of Narcan, whereas most people carry only one or two doses at a time. This drug has appeared in Europe and on the U.S. East Coast over the past two years, and its presence is spreading like octopus tentacles.
There is no doubt that the emergence of this deadly, hard-to-treat narcotic poses a major concern for security authorities in any country, especially those where young people have significant financial resources, such as Kuwait. These drugs are easy to produce, smuggle, and distribute, and their huge profits drive many smugglers to risk their lives in trafficking them. Therefore, it is unjust to leave the fight against them solely to security authorities; we all must share their burden. The situation urgently requires cooperation from families, with all their members, and reporting any cases of addiction to prevent treatment from being delayed. The work of anti-drug heroes, around the clock, deserves all praise. They need our support and gratitude for their efforts, having placed their lives in their hands while confronting the most vicious and despicable smugglers, who know they will certainly face death if caught and thus usually kill anyone who stands in their way and use extreme violence against anti-drug officers before surrendering.
We live in an increasingly dangerous world, and no family is immune to the threat of new, deadly drugs. The blows of this plague often strike the sectors most confident in their immunity. Ahmad Al-Sarraf
