MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president said Friday that American families are to blame for the fentanyl overdose crisis because they don’t hug their children enough.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s comment culminates a week of provocative statements from him about the crisis caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid trafficked by Mexican cartels that is blamed for some 70,000 overdose deaths a year in the United States.
López Obrador said family values have collapsed in the United States because parents don’t let their children live at home long enough. He has also denied that Mexico produces fentanyl.
On Friday, the Mexican president said in a morning press conference that the problem was due to «lack of hugs, of hugs.»
“There is a lot of disintegration of families, there is a lot of individualism, there is a lack of love, of brotherhood, of hugs and hugs,” López Obrador said of the US crisis. “That is why they (US officials) should dedicate funds to address the causes.
López Obrador has repeatedly said that Mexico’s close-knit family values are what have saved him from the wave of fentanyl overdoses. Experts say that the 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 frequently sell methamphetamine in Mexico, where the drug is more popular because it supposedly helps people work more.
López Obrador has been affected by calls in the United States to designate Mexican drug gangs as terrorist organizations. Some Republicans have said they favor using the US military to take down Mexican cartels.
On Wednesday, López Obrador called anti-drug policies in the US a failure and proposed banning the use of fentanyl in medicines in both countries, despite the fact that very little of the drug finds its way from hospitals to the illegal market.
US authorities estimate that most illegal fentanyl is produced in clandestine Mexican laboratories using Chinese precursor chemicals. Relatively little of the illegal market comes from the diversion of medicinal fentanyl used as anesthesia in surgeries and other procedures.
There have only been scattered and isolated reports of glass vials of medicinal fentanyl finding their way onto the illegal market. Most of the illegal fentanyl is pressed by Mexican cartels into counterfeit pills that look like other drugs like Xanax, oxycodone, or Percocet.