It's one fentanyl overdose every seven minutes. Teams of paramedics responding to frantic emergency calls, trying to revive victims, often arriving too late.
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The deceased are sometimes sprawled out in the dark, as if they were shot, but the accessories to death are needles or pills or powder, strewn next to the bodies. The fentanyl they consume - in some cases unsuspectingly - is trafficked into the United States in hatchbacks and sedans, stashed in trailer parks and homes that are occasionally the sites of dramatic busts.
It is not only an American crisis. Fentanyl is now manufactured in Mexico - and it flows through the country on its way to the border. Much of it remains in cities like Tijuana, where communities of deportees have become addicts. Paramedics there are stretched even thinner than their American counterparts, trying to save overdose victims in a country where naloxone, which reverses the effect of opioids, is almost impossible to find.