Mexico’s president says US families were to blame for the fentanyl overdose crisis because they don’t hug their kids enough.
On Friday, Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador capped a week of “provocative” comments referring to the Fentanyl overdose crisis in the United States, reports CTV News Canada.
The Mexican president told a morning news briefing that the problem was caused by “a lack of hugs, of embraces.”
“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 embraces,” Amlo said of the US crisis, according to The Guardian. “That is why they [US officials] should be dedicating funds to address the causes.”
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid trafficked by Mexican cartels that have been blamed for about 70,000 overdose deaths per year in the United States.
Lopez Obrador, commonly known as Amlo, said family values have broken down in the United States because parents don’t let their children live at home long enough. He has also denied that Mexico produces fentanyl.
It seems that the Mexican cartels are making so much money off Fentanyl, that very little is sold in Mexico. Cartels frequently sell methamphetamines in Mexico, where the drug is more popular because it purportedly helps people work harder.
The Associated Press reports that López Obrador has been stung by calls in the United States to designate Mexican drug gangs as terrorist organizations. Some Republicans have said they favor using the U.S. military to crack down on the Mexican cartels.
U.S. authorities estimate that most illegal fentanyl is produced in clandestine Mexican labs using Chinese precursor chemicals. Relatively little of the illegal market comes from diverting medicinal fentanyl used as anesthesia in surgeries and other procedures.
