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The New Drug Crisis No One’s Ready ForThe Daily host Natalie Kitroeff speaks with New York Times investigative reporter Azam Ahmed about the need for a new framework to address the new synthetic drug crisis.
– It’s treating it as a public health crisis and not a criminal problem. – Exactly. Which is something the United States has always struggled with. – 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. – 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 are still getting this kind of retrograde rhetoric coming out of the White House and other corners of the U.S. government about cracking down more. 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. – One of the things that you’re doing with this reporting is forcing us, honestly, to look at this thing with very clear eyes, and to understand that we are that society that’s in the throes of an addiction crisis, and that it is happening in ways that I don’t think any of us expected it to. And I don’t know if any of us really, totally, understand.
The Daily host Natalie Kitroeff speaks with New York Times investigative reporter Azam Ahmed about the need for a new framework to address the new synthetic drug crisis.
May 26, 2026