Policymakers and the public are acutely aware that the powerful opioid fentanyl has significantly worsened the country's opioid epidemic, accounting for almost 20,000 deaths in 2016. But few people appreciate fentanyl's potential to permanently alter illegal drug markets and international relations along with them.
Heroin, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and virtually every other opioid traded on the black market depend on a plant -- the opium poppy -- for their raw material. Fentanyl in contrast is an opioid analogue that can be created from chemicals in a laboratory. As Vanda Felbab-Brown, Jonathan Caulkins and I describe in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, separating illicit opioid production from agriculture is a disruptive innovation for black markets.
Opium poppy-sourced drugs depend on control of arable land in countries where law enforcement is a minimal or at least corruptible presence. Plant-based opium production also requires a substantial number of agricultural workers who plant and tend opium poppies, remove raw opium from seed pods at harvest time and then package and store raw opium, some of which will be processed by other workers into drugs such as heroin.
This poppy-centered opium production system empowers warlords in Afghanistan and cartel leaders in Mexico because they control the right land. But fentanyl production requires no land at all. A small gang with a single talented chemist can thus economically undercut poppy-based opioid production. Even if old-line agriculturally based producers shift some of their opioid business to fentanyl, as have a few Mexican cartels, they find themselves in a weaker position because they no longer gain the political capital they once did from providing plentiful drug-production jobs to local residents.
