MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president said Friday that US families are to blame for the fentanyl overdose crisis because they don’t hug their children enough.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s comment caps a week of provocative remarks by him about the crisis caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid trafficked by Mexican cartels and blamed for about 70,000 overdose deaths a year in the United States becomes.
López Obrador said family values have collapsed in the United States because parents are not letting their children live at home long enough. He has also denied that Mexico produces fentanyl.
On Friday, Mexico’s president said in a morning press conference that the problem was caused by “a lack of hugs and hugs.”
“There’s a lot of family breakdown, there’s a lot of individualism, there’s a lack of love, of brotherhood, of hugs and hugs,” López Obrador said of the US crisis. “Therefore, they (US officials) should allocate funds to address the root causes.”
López Obrador has repeatedly said that Mexico’s close-knit family values saved it from the fentanyl overdose wave. Experts say Mexican cartels are now making so much money in the US market that they see no need to sell fentanyl in their home market.
Cartels often sell methamphetamine in Mexico, where the drug is more popular because it is said to help people work harder.
López Obrador has been hit by calls in the United States to label Mexican drug gangs as terrorist organizations. Some Republicans have said they prefer using the US military to crack down on the Mexican cartels.
On Wednesday, López Obrador called US anti-drug policies a failure and proposed banning the use of fentanyl in medicine in both countries — even though little of the drug makes it from hospitals to the illicit market.
US authorities estimate that most illicit fentanyl is manufactured in clandestine Mexican laboratories using Chinese precursor chemicals. Relatively little of the illicit market comes from the diversion of medicinal fentanyl, used as an anesthetic in surgeries and other procedures.
There have only been isolated and isolated reports of glass vials of medicinal fentanyl making it onto the illicit market. Most illegal fentanyl is molded into counterfeit pills by Mexican cartels that look like other drugs like Xanax, Oxycodone, or Percocet.
Source : www.washingtontimes.com