A Flood of New, Deadlier Drugs

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Daily – "A Flood of New, Deadlier Drugs"

Date: May 26, 2026
Host: Natalie Kitroeff
Guest: Azam Ahmed (NYT investigative journalist)

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Daily examines the rapidly shifting landscape of illicit drug trafficking, focusing on an explosion of new, extremely potent synthetic drugs. Host Natalie Kitroeff speaks with Azam Ahmed, whose investigative reporting exposes how synthetic drugs—notably those more potent than fentanyl—are proliferating, how this new wave is affecting American jails, and why enforcement struggles to keep up. The episode explores the consequences of enforcement-driven drug policies and discusses harm reduction as a possible alternative approach.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Synthetic Drug Revolution

[00:33–04:30]

• The traditional "war on drugs" targeted plant-based substances (heroin, cocaine, marijuana). Today, labs churn out synthetic drugs that can be altered endlessly, evading regulation.
• There are now around 1,450 new psychoactive substances, a number that has tripled in the last decade.
• Synthetic drugs are cheaper, more potent, deadlier, easier to manufacture and smuggle, and much harder to track or treat.
• Example: Fentanyl, already 50x more powerful than heroin, is being outpaced by even deadlier substances.

Notable Quote

“It’s one of the most entrepreneurial markets in the world. They find new ways, because as long as you have demand, someone’s gonna figure out how to supply it.”
— Azam Ahmed [05:52]

2. Beyond Fentanyl: A New Arms Race

[04:30–06:07]

• New synthetic opioids like nitazenes can be 20–40x more potent than fentanyl. Originally created in the 1950s and never marketed due to extreme potency, these are now resurfacing.
• Regulation of fentanyl’s precursor chemicals and crackdown on supply have simply triggered innovation and proliferation of new dangerous substances.

Notable Quote

“Regulation just breeds innovation.”
— Natalie Kitroeff [05:47]

3. Synthetic Drugs in America’s Jails: The Cook County Case

[06:07–13:11, 14:16–18:48]

• Synthetic drugs are incubating in jails and prisons. Cook County Jail in Chicago became a case study after inmates began overdosing on drugs ingested via drug-soaked paper.
• Sheet of paper found in the jail tested positive for 10 different synthetic drugs.
• Emotional testimonies from incarcerated individuals reveal the desperation and motivation to use, even in the face of obvious risk.

Notable Quotes

“They’re literally smoking paper … How do you stop paper?”
— Azam Ahmed [07:33]
“It’s hard being in jail. … When you get high, it’s just like, whatever. … You don’t care. It is what it is.”
— Rashad Rowry (Inmate) [10:29]

Memorable Moment

• Authorities discovered the drugs were entering via paper slipped in by visitors, some of whom coordinated through a single "paper baron" dealer. Enforcement led to dramatic arrests, but overdoses continued unabated.

4. Enforcement’s Limits: The “Whack-a-Mole” Game

[18:48–21:10]

• Even after busting a major supplier, new drugs kept flooding in, sometimes concealed within Amazon-delivered books.
• Every crackdown prompts traffickers to innovate around restrictions, leaving jail authorities struggling to adapt.

Notable Quote

“It was just that representative microcosm of this quixotic game of Whack A Mole that they continue to play… And this is in the most controlled setting you can imagine. What happens when that hits the street?”
— Azam Ahmed [20:45]

5. The Road Ahead: What Can Be Done?

[21:10–25:43]

• The administration’s intensified enforcement (against cartels, smuggling) is largely ineffective—taking down traffickers simply creates power vacuums and more chaos (“hydra effect”).
• Decriminalization or legalization: Theoretical as a solution, but today's synthetic drugs are so numerous and unknown that regulatory frameworks can't keep up; legalization carried more promise in a world with fewer, better understood substances.
• Harm Reduction: Genuine optimism found here; approaches like needle exchanges, Narcan distribution, and treating users as patients rather than criminals save lives and stabilize communities.

Notable Quotes

“We’re still arguing about a paradigm that might have worked when there were just three or four drugs we were worried about. Now we’re worried about 1400 and counting.”
— Azam Ahmed [23:35]
“It’s treating it as a public health crisis—and not a criminal problem.”
— Natalie Kitroeff [24:34]

• The immense creative innovation of drug chemists is matched only by the need for similar creativity in responses from policy-makers and public health officials.

Closing Thoughts

“We’ve never needed more creative thinking about this problem because it’s never been more dangerous or creative. We’re kind of moving in opposite directions on one of the most costly issues of our time.”
— Azam Ahmed [25:43]

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Timeline/Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:33 – Episode intro and framing the synthetic drug crisis
• 03:15 – Tripling of new synthetic drugs in past decade
• 04:32 – Nitazenes: more potent than fentanyl
• 06:07 – Synthetic drugs in Cook County Jail
• 07:33 – Inmates overdosing on "smoked paper"
• 08:54–10:12 – Rashad Rowry on drug use inside jail
• 14:16 – Jail’s struggle to keep drugs out; investigating paper routes
• 17:02 – Detection of jail’s drug distribution network
• 18:48 – Major bust and realization that problem persists
• 20:23 – Smuggling via Amazon deliveries
• 21:40 – Why enforcement and old paradigms are failing
• 23:57 – Harm reduction as a new framework
• 24:41 – Need for a total reframing of the crisis

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Conclusion

This episode exposes a stark new reality: synthetic drugs are evolving faster than society can respond. Jails are a deadly proving ground for these substances, and attempts to stem the tide through enforcement alone are failing. The conversation underscores the urgency of reframing the crisis as a public health issue and adopting harm reduction strategies, while honestly confronting the scale and complexity of today’s synthetic drug epidemic.

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For more stories from The Daily and the New York Times, visit their podcast page.

Transcript

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[Natalie Kitroeff]

Times, I'm Natalie Kitro F. This is the Daily. Just as America is beginning to wrap its arms around the fentanyl crisis, a new kind of drug epidemic is emerging. It's faster, more addictive and far more lethal. And what's driving it are new types of synthetic drugs. Substances that can be made almost anywhere, altered endlessly, trafficked easily, and then consumed in just about any form imaginable. Today, my colleague Azam Ahmed explains how these deadlier drugs are beginning to take hold and brings us inside one effort to do something about it. It's Tuesday, may 26th. Azum, welcome to the Daily. It's wonderful to have you here in New York.

[Azam Ahmed]

Well, thank you for having me.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

You are here not only because you have won multiple awards for your investigations. Thank you. This is true, you can't deny it. Not only because you are, I think it's fair to say, a foreign correspondence, foreign correspondent, but because you are in the middle of truly mind blowing reporting on the new world of synthetic drugs. And I think this is something that none of us, even me, who, you know, I have a special interest reporting experiences in this world, really understood until you started to break these stories. So I wanna just start with how you got to this, what drew you in to these stories.

[Azam Ahmed]

You know, obviously we work together in Mexico and in Mexico you're constantly looking at the repercussions of the war on drugs. You're looking at countless lives lost. You're looking at, you know, inordinate amounts of drugs, fentanyl, moving north into the United States. You kind of see the mechanism of failure up close. And we all know the war on drugs has failed. We also know like it not only failed, it kind of made things worse. And you realize fentanyl, meth, two of the first sort of synthetic drugs were out there. Basically they were harbingers of this sort of dystopian future that is upon us. For most of human history, drugs have been grown in the land, you know, when the war on drugs was first declared by President Nixon, there was cocaine, marijuana, heroin, the big ones. Now there's like, 1450 new psychoactive substances. These are.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Is that a real.

[Azam Ahmed]

That's a real stat.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yikes.

[Azam Ahmed]

It's gone up. Like, it's tripled in the last decade. I mean, the number of new drugs that are coming out. It's like chefs testing new recipes. Because it's all synthetic now, it's made in labs, and you can basically turn a molecule and change it in all these different ways and have a completely new drug, which basically leads to the major point that they are largely more potent, more deadly, easier to manufacture, easier to smuggle, harder to track, harder to treat, and more profitable than almost any time in human history.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

What you're describing is the kind of beginning of something, but that beginning is really important. This idea exactly. That you get a drug like fentanyl 50 times more powerful, I think, than heroin. It's really compact, it's really easy to transport, it's really easy to make. You can make it, I saw in a kitchen in Sinaloa, randomly. You can open a lab anywhere. There is a kind of revolution that happens with that first step.

[Azam Ahmed]

Exactly. And I think for good reason. We in the United States look at fentanyl as almost the end all be all because of how many? I mean, these, like, massive numbers of death. Like, we're not accustomed to that. It's so pervasive. And yet there are now new drugs much more powerful than fentanyl that are popping up not just in the United States, but all over the world.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay, talk about that. I want to hear about that.

[Azam Ahmed]

So a drug called nitosines can be 20 to 40 times more potent than fentanyl. They're an opioid that was created in the 1950s by Swiss Pharmaceutical, but turned out to be so potent that it didn't really have a natural market, and so it never went to market. And then somebody, basically, as this sort of fentanyl crisis was unfolding, mined some archive and found the formula for making nitosines, and they started producing it. Once they started producing it, they now have, like a dozen different variants of nitosines that have been discovered all over the place. You're finding them in the United States, you're finding them throughout Europe. And one of the reasons you're finding them in Europe is because fentanyl has been so controlled and so tightly managed. This is important because this is the heart and center of why the drug war kind of made everything worse. So you're like, shit, we got to do something about Fentanyl. This is killing way too many people. Let's control the precursor chemicals. Let's pressure Chinese pharma from making this stuff. Let's crack down on the Mexican cartels.

[Rashad Rowry (Inmate)]

Great.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

This is the approach of the drug war, to focus on enforcement, to focus on supply.

[Azam Ahmed]

Supply. To focus on the supply side. And then they're like, oh, cool, okay, we'll just come up with something else. So now they've made nitosines available on the market, and that is gradually expanding, and more people are dying from it. But now there's things that are even going to replace nitosines that are popping up in certain places. That is the thing about synthetic drugs.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Basically what you've described is the idea that regulation just breeds innovation.

[Azam Ahmed]

Innovation. It's one of the most entrepreneurial markets in the world. I mean, they find new ways, because as long as you have demand, someone's gonna figure out how to supply it, because if it's restricted, it's gonna be lucrative. I mean, we're looking at a totally different universe.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay, so now I wanna talk about your latest investigation that recently came out that talks about the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Because while these drugs might not be on every street corner yet, you have found that the place that they're almost being incubated is in American jails and prisons. So walk me through what you found in Cook County. Walk me through that story.

[Azam Ahmed]

So in January 2023, jail authorities are called to the scene of a dead body. And they show up and there's this inmate who basically has died from some kind of a overdose. But they can't find anything. There's no contraband. They just find all these little paper roaches sort of scattered around like burned confetti. And they're kind of mystified by what this is, but it's clear the guy's overdosed. And it sort of launches them on this incredible odyssey where they start having these deaths and these crazy overdoses, People going into almost these exorcistic fits, having seizures, and they're watching them on camera, and then it clicks. They're like, oh, my God, they're smoking paper. They're literally smoking paper. And they realize what's happened is someone has figured out how to turn synthetic drugs into liquid, soak sheets of paper into it, and then smuggle paper into the jail. Now, paper is the most ubiquitous thing in the world, right? It's been around since ancient Egypt, right? How do you stop paper?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Well, so just to back up what is on this paper, like, do they know you're describing the exorcistic fit and I'm wondering what causes that at the

[Azam Ahmed]

time, they don't know what's on it. They would find someone high or maybe find someone dead. They would get a toxicology report of the person who died to figure out what they might have smoked. They would also find paper within the jail facility itself and they'd send that off to get tested. It would be anything from like cannabinoids, which is a synthetic form of cannabis, which can actually be deadly, to sometimes fentanyl, like all different kinds of synthetic substances. I mean, at some point they were finding recipes for raid and rat poison. And then In August of 2024, they found this single sheet of paper that had 10 different synthetic drugs on it, which didn't make any sense. Right. Because it was all different sorts of things that have different corporal implications. Right. Like it was cannabinoids, it was opioids. Like they, they affect you. The high is different.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Is it 10 different substances all in different quadrants or.

[Azam Ahmed]

No, they're overlapping it. Basically the best we could figure is somebody had a bunch of chemicals they were spraying on paper and they just wanted to get rid of them all, so they dumped them all on one sheet. And that, I mean, from your reporting on fentanyl, there's not really a calculation of how deadly this could be, how potent this is gonna be.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

To the extent that there's a calculation, the calculation is how bad can we make this? Meaning how potent, how strong?

[Azam Ahmed]

Completely. That's exactly right. It's the more potent, the less I have to smuggle.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Correct, Right.

[Azam Ahmed]

The less risk I take.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yeah.

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The more potent.

[Azam Ahmed]

It's usually cheaper too.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Azam Ahmed]

You know, you get whatever. It's like the bang for the buck phenomenon.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay. I wanna ask about what the experience of actually doing it is. I mean, I think part of the other thing that a lot of people who don't use these drugs don't understand is what is attractive about the feeling. So just walk through the implications of people rushing to use a substance that is life threatening completely. What, what is happening there? What's the psychology of that?

[Azam Ahmed]

It's one of the most baffling things for non. For a non using public to understand about the mentality of drug use. And it is that like death is not dissuasive. You know, someone dies and our reaction is like, oh my God, why would anybody ever touch that?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right.

[Azam Ahmed]

But if you are a user, you're like, that must be really strong. And I remember having conversations with people in the jail, like, you know, one. One guy that I spent a lot of time with was Rashad Rowry. And he had previously smoked paper, but had now sort of sworn it off and hadn't been using

[Rashad Rowry (Inmate)]

was like, thanks. It was either Thanksgiving or Christmas. It was one of the time holidays we was on lockdown. And I'm like, it. Why not? I liked it, but I'm like, he

[Azam Ahmed]

was like a really thoughtful guide into why people use it and how they use it.

[Rashad Rowry (Inmate)]

It's hard being in jail. It is very hard being in jail. Like, definitely when you like, watching somebody. I grew up through pictures is hard. I've been here 11 years. And when you get high, it's just like, whatever. Sometimes when you get high, you don't even care about going home. Yeah, you don't care. It is what it is.

[Azam Ahmed]

He sort of describes the desperation and the sadness, this need to escape from sort of your life collapsing in on you.

[Rashad Rowry (Inmate)]

You don't really think about the consequences behind it. You just think about this right here. I want this. No matter what happened, I want this. I ain't gonna be the one to die from it.

[Azam Ahmed]

That's so interesting what you just said. There's also a huge component of these crises of tolerance. Your body quickly adapts to whatever toxins it's putting into it, such that you need more. So if you're a regular user and you know there's a heavy pack and somebody died, and your objective is to escape in as profound a way as you can, like a portal out of the misery of jail and all the trappings of life that that entails, you move towards it, not away from it.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And you might be saying, well, that person who died, they just weren't used to it. They were soft.

[Azam Ahmed]

They weren't like me exactly. Exactly like I could handle it.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

I've built up this tolerance.

[Azam Ahmed]

Yeah. There's a weird sense of confidence and almost competitiveness about who can use more drugs and how you know, how much potency you can handle.

[Rashad Rowry (Inmate)]

But then the crazy part about this. So many people want to stop smoking. So many people want to actually stop.

[Azam Ahmed]

Really?

[Rashad Rowry (Inmate)]

Yes, but just don't know how.

[Azam Ahmed]

They don't even know what they're addicted to, do they?

[Rashad Rowry (Inmate)]

Nah, not really.

[Azam Ahmed]

How does it work in here? Like, when it comes in, how do you hear about it?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

After the break, Azum explains how the authorities at the Cook County Jail tried to stop synthetic drugs from flooding in. We'll be right back.

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[Natalie Kitroeff]

So Azam, tell me how this jail goes about dealing with this problem, keeping these drugs out.

[Azam Ahmed]

So they are basically like, how do we get rid of paper? The sheriff of Cook county calls around to other jurisdictions facing similar problems because now this is becoming a nationwide phenomenon. I mean, I found instances of 14 different states that have had some kind of prosecution for drug so paper incarcerated.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Oh, so it's not just Cook County.

[Azam Ahmed]

Yeah, it's all over the place. So some of these places have decided we're going to ban paper outright.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yeah.

[Azam Ahmed]

And he's like, I didn't want to do that.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Why?

[Azam Ahmed]

The thing about paper is it's a lifeline for people in jail. You know, it's not just administrative numbers and like, you know, menus or whatever else they use paper for. It is a letter from a child to his father. It is a note from a mother to her son. It is the thing that tethers you to the world outside of this dark space of privation that is the Cook County Jail. So they start with things like sensing the texture of soaked paper. Guys would start wearing gloves and going through pages of every individual piece of mail by hand.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

This is crazy to think about someone just like, holding a piece of paper and, like, feeling it and smelling it to be like, are there just extremely deadly drugs on this?

[Azam Ahmed]

Yeah, exactly. Like, could this kill people in our jail? Completely. So they made sure they were following all the protocols, monitoring this in a much more comprehensive way. But basically, the lead sort of criminal investigator inside the jail is this guy named Justin Wilkes. He's like, it's not enough to, like, play defense to try and keep the paper out of prison. We gotta go on the offense and figure out who's doing this. And he's like, you're sort of central casting of, like, a Midwestern nice guy. He's avuncular. He has glasses. He never curses. Instead of using words like ass, he says, keister. I mean, in a jail environment, that's pretty exceptional.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Did you have to censor yourself around him?

[Azam Ahmed]

I mean, I felt initially, yeah, I felt like, self conscious. I cursed a lot. So I was like, is he gonna judge me for this? He's gonna keep talking to me if, like, he corrects me by saying keister. So he kind of lays down that as, like, goal number one. We gotta figure out what's happening. And this launches them on this really astounding investigation. Jailhouse snitches would tell things here and there, but even the corrections officers, nobody was really saying, like, this is the main supply. This is the guy who's producing it or the groups that are producing it. And then they find there's this one prisoner who had been, you know, had basically been caught with paper stuffed in his anus, and he's been prosecuted for having this. But they start wondering, well, how did he get it? So they look at every single one of his prison visits for, like, an extended period prior to him being busted in the jail with this paper. And they realize that over the course of, you know, months, his girlfriend who had come to visit him would always slip him paper. They're like, oh, wow.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Oh, my God. So she was slipping in paper. Like, what?

[Azam Ahmed]

Cause they have, like. It'd be like me and you sitting here talking, right? They would have visitation hours. Someone would distract the guard, and she would find a way to get him paper.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Wow.

[Azam Ahmed]

It's not like a dog is going to pick up that smell. You know, at the time, they might not have even known what they were looking for.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Azam Ahmed]

So another detective, he shows up at the girlfriend's house, and he basically just gets her to talk. And she describes this whole network of, like, all these different prisoners with girlfriends who are all coming and visiting and doing the same thing. And it all ties back to this one dealer operating out of the south side of Chicago. And so they get on this huge case. They're like, wait a minute, we actually know who's behind this? So they start tracking this guy. They realize he has this huge stash house in the south of Chicago. They're like, this is big. We've actually found a guy who is doing stuff across state lines. He is what we believe to be the single biggest supplier to the Cook County Jail of drug soaked paper. This guy is like a paper baron.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

All from the girlfriend.

[Azam Ahmed]

All from the girlfriend. So we follow this case for almost a year until finally, like, I'm there when they arrest the main figure. You know, we're all like sort of barreling down this suburban street. They like pull up in front of this house with like one of these signal blocker trucks. Somebody bashes down the door, they send a drone in to search the house, and then everybody floods in. And it's crazy because it's like this new drug bust. They come out carrying these, like, amber bottles filled with chemicals and like, sheaths of paper. This guy has like a postal setup in his house with like, you know, prepaid envelopes to send drug soaked paper to different places presumably. And it's just this dude operating out of there.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay, so they find this guy.

[Azam Ahmed]

They find this guy, they bust him, he gets arraigned, and I go back to Cook County, I'm like, wow, you know, like a year later, here it is. You've busted like the biggest paper pusher in Illinois, presumably, like, what's gonna happen? And in my mind, I guess I already kind of knew. I was like, this isn't gonna change anything. Like, it's. Every time we take down a kingpin, it ranges from, like, bad to worse. The response to it, I mean, our time in Mexico.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yeah.

[Azam Ahmed]

Every time they killed one of these capos, they like announced it with this sort of saber rattle of like, look, we did it again. And every time there would be a fight for control, there would be more violence. Worst case scenario, it would be the hydra effect where they cut off the head and multiple heads sprung up. And then you just had disorganized chaos in the same way they bust this guy. And I'm talking to Justin, the investigator, and he's like, did we solve a mystery today? Yes. Did we solve the mystery? Do I think this is gonna change the phenomenon? He's like, no.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

So after all that, they know it. He basically recognizes, yeah, this is a win for us. But this is nowhere near the end. Doing this is not gonna solve the problem.

[Azam Ahmed]

This is another spoke in the turning

[Natalie Kitroeff]

wheel, you know, I mean, did that pan out?

[Azam Ahmed]

It did, it did. A couple months later I checked in on the data and they were like, we're having the same number of overdoses. They now something that's five times more potent on paper there.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Wow.

[Azam Ahmed]

But also around that time, they found new ways and novel ways in which they're getting the drugs in. People had figured out how to use Amazon to send drug soaked paper into the jail.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Through Amazon.

[Azam Ahmed]

Through Amazon. Basically someone would register as a third party seller, would have a drug soaked book listed on that, and then the person would buy from that direct seller, thereby sort of laundering a drug soaked book through Amazon and Amazon packaging. Which made it incredibly difficult because prior to that, jailhouse authorities were like, we don't have to worry about that. It's coming from Amazon.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

That's crazy. What an image.

[Azam Ahmed]

It was just that representative microcosm of this quixotic game of Whack a mole that they continue to play as they find new. Like, we're gonna crack down on that. Okay. They're gonna do something else. We're gonna crack down on this drug. Okay. We're gonna get another drug. And this is in the most controlled setting you can imagine. That, I think is what scares them the most. Cause they're having a hard time controlling that in a jail setting. What happens when that hits the street?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Okay. So now that you have your arms kind of wrapped around just how bad this new synthetic drug epidemic really is, just how much invention and reinvention is kind of built into it. I want to ask, and I want to turn to the question of what do we do now? Because I think a lot of people who hear this and who have not spent more than a year covering it are going to be wondering like, how do we stop this? What is the path?

[Azam Ahmed]

It's funny, you know, as journalists, we try to like, kind of stick with like presenting what's happening, but you can't help but think about what's the road that led us here? Is there a road to lead us out? Or are we kind of trapped in this cyclical framework where we just keep doing more of the same thing? And that is the inescapable feeling, especially with this administration, which has opted to kick more ass, so to speak, against drug cartels and smuggling and all of that, is that that hasn't worked. You might see the Mexican police least motivated to like bust anarcho. But we've Busted a lot of these guys before, and all it does is just a new kingpin emerges.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

What about the other option, the alternate route here from the one that the drug war has taken? Addressing demand.

[Azam Ahmed]

Yeah. Legalization or decriminalization or any way of kind of.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Yes. Of getting at the obvious one side. The fact that in Mexico, the idea that you're going to stop drugs from being produced without dealing with the fact that the largest consumer market in the entire world sits right on top of its country, on its border, is sort of laughable. What about those methods? How do you see that? Is that a potential way forward here?

[Azam Ahmed]

The thing that struck me is like, this whole framework around legalization, decriminalization. We have been talking about it for so long. There's a few countries that have done it, like Portugal, but by and large, experiments in this have been few and far between, and it's mostly just been a talking point among progressives. The problem is it's too dangerous to kind of have a decriminalization procedure that creates a wider array of availability for things that chemists and scientists and doctors themselves don't know. The human implications, like nitosines, has never been tested in a medical setting for any long period of time. We're still arguing about a paradigm that might have worked when there were just three or four drugs we were worried about. Now we're worried about 1400 and counting.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

So what you're talking about is a situation where, like, maybe decriminalization could have been a solution in before times, but we're not in before times. The horse is out of the barn, basically.

[Azam Ahmed]

Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying. So I think, to answer your bigger question, which is, what do we do? If you talk to a lot of scientists, they'll be like, yeah, I don't think legalization is the way or decriminalization is the way to go either. You should have elements of this, like harm reduction, for instance.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Right.

[Azam Ahmed]

That is an important component of this that Europe is really focused on. Norm reduction is basically what it sounds like. We understand people are going to use drugs. We understand that we're never going to be able to fully reduce all of the demand. So how do we keep deaths and serious injury from happening?

[Natalie Kitroeff]

That's interesting.

[Azam Ahmed]

We swap needles. Right. So no one's sharing needles. HIV rates plummet. We issue Narcan everywhere, so that if your friend overdoses, you give him a shot of Narcan, you revive them, they don't die. We pass laws that are like, if you call the cops, or rather the authorities, because your friend is overdosed and you're worried they're going to die. We're not going to prosecute you or send you to jail because that then means fewer people will die.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

It's treating it as a public health crisis.

[Azam Ahmed]

Exactly.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

And not a criminal problem.

[Azam Ahmed]

Exactly. Which is something the United States has always struggled with.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

It sounds like what you've learned is that we don't have the language to describe what we're seeing. And so a first step is to just all of us wrap our minds around what this is and really change our entire framework of thinking about it.

[Azam Ahmed]

I think that's right. I think it's also just looking at it with like dispassionate, brutal honesty, which has always been hard for us. We are still thinking that blowing up boats or like targeting kingpins is going to stop this, and it's clearly not. You can have little bits of pressure and maybe that can even be a good thing to force the Mexicans to actually do something about this gigantic industry within their borders, but that's not going to solve it. We've never needed more creative thinking about this problem because it's never been more dangerous or creative. We're kind of moving in opposite directions on one of the most costly issues of our time.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Thank you so much for being on the show.

[Azam Ahmed]

Thanks for having me.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

We'll be right back.

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[Natalie Kitroeff]

Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday night, U.S. officials said that American forces had carried out new strikes on missile launch sites in Iran and on boats trying to place mines. U.S. central Command said the strikes were defensive and intended to protect U.S. troops. The strikes came hours after Iran's top negotiators arrived in Qatar for talks on a peace agreement with the US the terms of any potential deal remain unclear, though, including the fate of Iran's nuclear program, its missile stockpile, and whether it would keep exerting control over the Strait of Hormuz. Israel also signaled on Monday that it intended to escalate fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which could further complicate the talks. Iran has said that any agreement to end the war with the US And Israel should also cover the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah and A gunman was shot and killed by Secret Service officers on Saturday after he opened fire near the White House. Trump was in the building at the time and had made it known that he would be spending the weekend there. A bystander who was struck by gunfire was in stable condition on Sunday.

[Azam Ahmed]

Finally, artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

Pope Leo XIV delivered a stark warning to humanity on Monday about the risks of artificial intelligence.

[Azam Ahmed]

Decisions about technology must never be separated from conscience and responsibility.

[Natalie Kitroeff]

The message came in what's the known as a papal encyclical, which is a centuries old form of communication used by the Pope to deliver teachings on moral or social challenges. He specifically called for government regulation of the companies driving the AI boom, retraining for the workers threatened by it, and actions to shield children from hypersexualized or fake AI generated information. Today's episode was produced by Christina Avalos, Mustafa Mirza, David Hur, Asta Chaturvedi, Mary Wilson, Nina Feldman and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Devin Greenleaf, with help from Michael Benoit and Rob Zipko, and contains music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily I'm Natalie Kitroweth. See you tomorrow.

[Deloitte/Capital One/IBM/Ritual Ad Narrator]

This podcast is supported by the Capital One venture X card. VentureX offers the premium benefits you expect, like a $300 annual Capital One travel credit for less than you expect. Elevate your earn with unlimited double miles on every purchase, bringing you one step closer to your next dream destination. Plus, enjoy access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. The Capital One Venture X Card what's in your wallet? Terms apply Lounge access is subject to change. See capitalone.com for details.