By Esteban Cabrera
Santo Domingo, DR: predominantly, the opioid crisis has already entered the Dominican Republic. The most worrying thing is that the authorities try to hide or not reveal the true dimensions with which the scourge is already hitting the population. Recently, the director of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. José Ramírez, said that every week the two main hospitals for cancer treatment in the country detect many falsified prescriptions from people seeking to obtain fentanyl to get high.
Whoever has eyes to see and whoever has ears to hear that is a voice of alarm that no one can let go unnoticed, especially if one takes into account that, in this country, pharmacies do not have strict regulations on prescriptions. Doctors or the lack of institutionality in regulatory bodies such as the “National Directorate for Drug Control” (DNCD). That is, the church is in the hands of Luther.
Seen in this way, the opioid crisis known in other countries, especially in the United States, is already in the Dominican Republic, which the authorities are trying to hide; this represents the greatest challenge that the Dominican government has faced after the pandemic of COVID-19, a true health crisis of unprecedented proportions that, if not faced responsibly, could pass the point of no return, causing devastating effects on the Dominican people.
In general, fentanyl, which is an opioid similar to morphine, has a predominant use in anesthesiology and management of extreme pain in cancer patients, it is used by the unscrupulous as an illegal drug, and those who consume it enter a degenerative process of their mental and physical health that quickly leads to death.
For example, in the United States, the opioid epidemic began in the second half of the 1990s, and deaths continue to be counted in the tens of miles each year. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1999 and 2019, nearly 500,000 people died from opioid-related overdose, whether illegal or prescribed by a doctor.
In 2019 alone, about 136 people appeared each day because of an opioid overdose, accounting for more than 70% of drug overdose deaths in the country. By comparison, it’s like a mid-sized plane crashes every day in the US.
According to US statistics, the opioid crisis worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, drug overdose deaths accelerated and increased by 38.4% from June 2019 to May 2020. Synthetic opioids, primarily illicit fentanyl, are the leading cause of the increase in overdose deaths.
In the United States, this crisis was already considered the crime of the century. And what is beginning to be seen in the Dominican Republic is the same, and if the government does not intervene in the case of a health crisis, something worse will happen, because its development is not being generated suddenly but is being manufactured in the country.
The opioid OxyCotin was first known in the North American market in the 90s, produced by the pharmaceutical company “Purdue Pharma” which, faced with enormous challenges and legal demands, is desperately seeking to declare bankruptcy. The Sackler family, owners of this, faces hundreds of thousands of civil lawsuits for its leading role in the opioid crisis in the US.
This must be taken into account by Dominican pharmacies and drug control authorities in the country because there is a consequence to paying. For now, they say they are falsifying the recipes, but they refuse to admit that this scourge can be easily controlled. There are also consequences for the doctors who prescribe them because nobody can do it; in the Dominican Republic, these doctors must have a license granted by the National Directorate for Drug Control (DNCD).
But this could be one of the major remains because this institution is very discredited, and it has not played the best role in fulfilling its functions. The simple fact of imagining that the control of the expansion of opioids is under its responsibility is somewhat similar to placing the church in the hands of Luther.
The truth is that already in the Dominican Republic. However, they will deny it; there is an opioid crisis that, first, the government must face immediately. Families must stabilize alerts on their children’s behavior so that they can detect any consumption of fentanyl in time and seek the required aid before it is too late.
