Natalie Kitro-Eff

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitro-Eff.

This is The Daily Watch.

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.

Azam, welcome to The Daily.

It's wonderful to have you here in New York.

You are here not only because you have won multiple awards for your investigations.

This is true.

You can't deny it.

Not only because you are, I think it's fair to say, a foreign correspondent's 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 want to just start with how you got to this.

What drew you in to these stories?

What you're describing is the kind of beginning of something, but that beginning is really important.

This idea that you get a drug like fentanyl, 50 times more powerful, I think, than heroin.

It's really compact.