MINISTERS in the UK are apparently starting to get worried.
As they should be.
They are worried about a drug that has destroyed America’s inner cities and is coming here.
Many of us have probably never heard of fentanyl.
But everybody in America has.
It is a lethally strong drug which has been sneaking into heroin supplies.
The high is said to be many times stronger than heroin.
It is also many times more lethal. Imagine. More lethal than heroin!
It is estimated that around 110,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, the majority from fentanyl.
In America the lethality of the drug is legendary.
The amount it takes to overdose is less than a small speck of powder.
In fact, a lethal dose wouldn’t fit on a quarter of a 1p piece.
In recent years, overdoses in the US have not just come about from people knowingly using heroin but from people using other illicit drugs, often with no idea that fentanyl has been cut into it. The results can be seen everywhere.
In cities such as Philadelphia this drug has decimated communities.
People lie like zombies in the streets.
A new version of the drug has already emerged known as “tranq”, which is a further mixture.
This reduces people to zombies.
I have seen the results in cities across America, from California on the West Coast to New York to the east.
People freeze where they are on the pavements, often lying down, sometimes standing up, but bent over double.
To describe the sights I have seen as horrific is to deeply understate things.
Ministers are now becoming concerned that this terrible drug has made its way to our shores.
The Taliban are largely to blame. They have banned opium poppy cultivation, which is used to create heroin.
With less heroin on the streets, users are turning to other drugs.
Fentanyl, banned here but which can be made using other legal drugs, is starting to hit the streets.
There have already been multiple cases of fentanyl overdoses in Glasgow, which has become the drug overdose capital of Europe.
It is a public health disaster that the British Government must do everything to avoid.
In America, both Republican and Democrat governments have failed to stop the crisis, though it has certainly grown due to President Biden’s open-border policy with Mexico.
President Trump came to office in part promising he would address the opioid crisis in the US.
That includes not only the legal prescriptions people get hooked on for pain medication, but also the illegal importing of drugs across the Mexican border.
In America this is a huge political issue.
Not least because it is well known that much of the fentanyl that finds its way there is made in China.
It is an opium war against America, arguably permitted, if not encouraged, by Beijing.
But Britain should have an easier route to dealing with this problem.
We have the advantage of being an island.
There is no reason why it is inevitable that drugs like fentanyl should find their way on to our illegal drug market.
Yet the fact that they are doing so is deeply troubling.
There will be many things that the Government could do to address this before it becomes the crisis it is in America.
It hasn’t yet proved able to stop the boats containing tens of thousands of illegal people across the Channel.
So we’ll see whether they prove any more adept at stopping these far-easier-to-smuggle drugs.
But the public should also be warned of the effects of this drug.
There are many people here who take drugs recreationally. All drugs come with some cost.
But fentanyl and similar narcotics come with a risk so many times higher.
There was a time, years ago, when people who died of overdoses from fentanyl and similar substances were thought to be at the margins of society.
At first, people paid little attention, thinking it only affected poor communities.
But slowly these lethal drugs made their way closer and closer into other communities.
One poll carried out this year said that three in ten Americans know someone who has suffered from addiction issues.
Half that number know someone who has died.
If you want to know what Britain mustn’t become, go to any Democrat-run city in the US. In fact, almost any city in the US.
You will see one of the biggest disasters in modern American history.
It is a disaster that cannot be allowed to come to the UK.
U2 OPENED the new Sphere performance venue in Las Vegas last weekend.
The pictures, like these, look absolutely stunning.
The £1.9billion, state-of-the-art, wraparound venue has some of the most amazing graphics and projections on earth.
It’s almost post-human.
I would love to see it. But only so long as Bono doesn’t think of doing one of his lectures on politics.
If he does then, frankly, I’d rather stay at home and listen to one of their old CDs.
THE NHS is a bottomless pit.
Despite us having some of the longest waiting times in the developed world, doctors and others insist on ever higher wages.
Labour will throw any money they want at the health service.
And the Conservatives will throw even more.
Because they fear Labour will attack them for spending too little.
But there really is no limit to what the taxpayer is expected to throw the way of doctors.
This week it emerged that NHS hospitals are paying doctors more than £3,000 a shift to cover striking colleagues.
Some hospitals are paying as much as £7,900 a shift.
What that means in practice is that while doctors strike for higher pay, taxpayers are already lobbing them higher pay.
Much higher pay.
No wonder the doctors don’t seem to want to come to a pay agreement.
They’re raking it in every day the negotiations go on.
Great tactic from the unions. Shame about the patients.
I HATE party conference season.
One of my greatest joys in life is never having to go to one again.
There were days when I did the rounds.
But wow, how depressing most of them are.
Standing ovations for totally unimportant soundbites.
People hobnobbing, glad-handing and jockeying for contacts.
But it is additionally sad when – as at this year’s Conservative conference in Manchester – it looks like the air has been let out of the balloon.
Senior ministers seem not to be able to draw any crowds.
But why would they?
The Tories have been in power for 13 years.
The Labour Opposition has no selling points.
Other than not being the Tories.
What a conference season. And what a shower.
EARLIER this year you might remember Nicola Sturgeon and the Scots Nats managed to go down in flames over a curious issue.
There are lots of things that could have brought them down.
Falling education standards on their watch. Increased drug deaths on their watch.
Falling living standards and life expectancy on their watch.
But wee Nicola ended up falling – among other things – because she couldn’t define what a woman was.
Specifically, she didn’t seem to realise that a man who identifies as a woman but is a rapist should not go into a women’s prison.
This is exactly the sort of thing that extreme trans campaigners insist never happens.
They claim that when people like me mention it we are making it up.
But it does happen, and it did.
The SNP got in a pickle because “Isla Bryson”, was convicted of two rapes of women before living as a woman himself.
Putting a male rapist into a women’s prison is like putting a fox into a chicken coop.
Well, perhaps all these eejits can hear the words of “Karen White”, born Stephen Wood, a 57-year-old child sex offender and rapist.
White is a born man who was put into a women’s prison while on remand awaiting trial for rape.
White has never taken hormone treatment or had any “sex-change” surgery.
While in prison he repeatedly sexually assaulted female inmates.
Now White has written a letter saying that biological men should not be allowed in women’s prisons.
“All I could see was fear in the face” of fellow inmates during his three months in New Hall prison in Yorkshire, he said.
So those of us who warned about this weren’t making it up, were we?
And if we’re not willing to listen to people who’ve even carried out attacks in prison, when will listen?
