Aivar has already begun to sweat. His last hit of “China white” was yesterday evening. Shortly his limbs will begin to ache, and if he doesn’t get a fix soon he will vomit what little food and water he’s had since waking up two hours earlier. He is at a needle exchange in the center of Estonia’s capital Tallinn and is using the opportunity to reflect on the deaths of his closest friends and the four overdoses he has suffered since he started injecting drugs 14 years ago. The 32-year-old understands how easily he could add to the statistic. One day the defibrillators will not work, he says. Still he can’t stop. Neither can so many other Estonians. Estonia has the highest number of per capita drug fatalities anywhere in Europe. The reason is fentanyl. Colloquially it is called China white, Persian white or Afghan. But they’re misnomers — glamorous tags attached to a powder, prosaically synthesized in clandestine labs across the border in Russia. It arrived in 2002 during a heroin drought. It never went away. These days it is the drug of choice for the many thousands of dedicated injectors in Tallinn. And, according to government chemists at the sparkling new labs in the capital’s Estonian Forensic Science Institute, it is anywhere between 100 and a thousand times stronger than the scag it replaced. (MORE: It Ain’t All Snow: Swiss Cities Have Some of the Highest Cocaine Use in Europe) The effectiveness of the drug makes it easy to smuggle. The largest single police bust last year was a batch of 1.5 kg — small enough to fit in a knapsack, but enough for almost 40,000 doses of the drug on the street. Uncut, it is hardly detectable at all. The tiny brown-powder doses carried around by addicts in fingernail-size sachets of aluminum foil have to be cut with whey powder or glucose to make them “safe” for humans. Typically, says Aime Riikoja, chief chemist at the Estonian Forensic Science Institute, the purity level is from 5% to 10%. … Continue reading Why Europe’s Healthiest Economy Has Its Worst Drug Problem