In September, Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s Home Secretary, hosted her counterparts from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – in London. The annual meeting was convened to discuss the most pressing security challenges facing the Anglosphere countries, and tackling the menace of synthetic opioids was high on the agenda.
Illicit drugs containing fentanyl or other synthetic opioids caused more than 70,000 deaths in the US in 2023 and approximately 50,000 in Canada between 2016 and 2025. The rates of those deaths have dropped recently, but synthetic opioid abuse continues and is present in other countries.
