The Fentanyl Fold

The debased position many fentanyl addicts crumble into is symbolic of the enslavement the drug demands.

Bent people are the public face of the nation’s fentanyl tragedy on the streets of many U.S. cities.

Our national scourge of fentanyl has generated ominous annual records in the form of hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths. But the more visible sign of widespread fentanyl supplies and addiction today is what on the street is called “the Fentanyl Fold” -- the body bending at the waist, often semi-permanently, as if in servile obedience to the drug.

This has happened as more and more people have survived their first exposures to

fentanyl and are simply now mightily addicted to it, with towering tolerances. The quick-acting nature of fentanyl requires constant use through the day. This is now possible due to the relentless supplies coming out of Mexico.

The fentanyl fold is one result of that.

I was in San Francisco lately, where more than 800 people have died of fentanyl overdose in recent years. (Hence the video above.) You can see the fentanyl fold in the parts of town where open-air drug use is common: the Tenderloin, on Market Street, on Mission, on Sixth and Seventh streets.

“It’s everywhere,” said Lamar, a street outreach worker I spoke to on Sixth Street. “I’d say 30 percent of the fentanyl users are folded over.”

This problem is so new that it’s not been studied to any degree I can find.

So to try to understand the Fentanyl Fold better, I spoke with a woman who has done missing-persons investigations for those lost in the city’s street drug world for many years.

Fentanyl, she told me, arrived in full force in San Francisco during the fall of 2019:

The city’s fentanyl addicts most often smoke the drug through straws off aluminum foil. In San Francisco, activists pass out squares of foil to drug addicts for free, along with the straws, in the belief that this allows addicts to use the drug more safely, and avoid switching to injecting it.

Only a small number of addicts in San Francisco actually inject it. In fact, she said, none of those who are folded over inject the drug.

All the many bent people she’s seen, she says, smoke it. Thus, her hunch, she told me, is that the fentanyl fold may be related to the constant ingestion of aluminum, which is known to cause a wide variety of afflictions in the human body.

Perhaps.

It is safe to say that behind all this is the synthetic drug revolution that has taken place in the Mexico drug-trafficking world, which I wrote about in THE LEAST OF US.

Mexican traffickers have figured out the benefits of making their drugs – using chemicals, no plants involved -- instead of growing them. If they can get access to chemical ingredients, which they can through shipping ports, they can make synthetic drugs all year round. Synthetics have no seasons and Mexico now has a labor pool trained in making fentanyl.

The Fentanyl Fold, then, is a sign of Mexican traffickers’ virtually unlimited access to ingredients to make fentanyl, and the impunity with which they have been able to make the drug – an impunity, by the way, that is guaranteed in part by the assault weapons liberally sold in the U.S., then smuggled south.

One thing that seems to end the Fentanyl Fold is sobriety.

“Of the people I’ve seen, once they got sober,” my source told me, “100 percent of them are standing up straight again … within three months.”

The big question, of course, is how long people can survive who live on the street addicted to a drug so potent that it not only control their brains but physically bends them at the waist.

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