Estonia Won the War on Fentanyl. What Came Next Was Even Worse.

"Almost no one had heard of fentanyl when it began tearing through Estonia, snatching lives like a bewildering plague.

 

It was 2002, more than a decade before the drug started unraveling American life. Overdoses in Estonia quickly rose to the highest levels in all of Europe, turning the tiny Baltic nation into the early front of a war that would soon turn global.

 

For the next 15 years, Estonia fought against a rising tide of addiction and death, passing new laws, picking apart the criminal underworld and expanding help for addicts. It dismantled clandestine labs and, with them, the last vestiges of Russian organized crime.

 

And like that, the epidemic all but ended. By 2018, fentanyl overdose deaths had plummeted more than 70 percent, a reversal the United States can only dream of.

 

A year later, after even more headway, some Estonian officials dared to wonder whether they had rid their nation of synthetic opioids altogether.

 

Perhaps, they thought, their war on drugs was over. Maybe they had actually won.

 

Only, the war was just beginning.

 

New synthetic drugs soon began circulating on Estonian streets, many of them so much deadlier that officers and addicts alike said they missed the seemingly simpler days of fentanyl.

 

“We wish we still had a fentanyl problem,” said Raigo Aas, the chief prosecutor for organized crime in Estonia.

 

The first new drugs to arrive, known as nitazenes, sent mortality rates skyrocketing again, proving even more addictive and harder to treat or quit. New varieties keep popping up, too, some more than 40 times stronger than fentanyl.

 

And just as the authorities started grappling with this new nightmare, they were hit yet again: An even newer synthetic drug blindsided them.

 

In the first three months of this year, a synthetic opioid called cychlorphine has begun killing even more people than nitazenes. It’s so new that the authorities know even less about it, never mind how to stop it.

 

“It’s changing too quickly,” said Katri Abel-Ollo, a researcher at Estonia’s National Institute for Health Development. “Just as we are trying to investigate and collect data on one drug, suddenly there’s a new phenomenon.”

 

Only last September, Estonia published its first research paper on nitazenes, detailing the epidemic of addiction.

 

“Now, not even a year later, we are confronting a totally different substance,” she said, shaking her head.

 

This is what the new drug war looks like.

 

Exceedingly powerful substances are being churned out with such speed that the agencies created to stop them are baffled, racing to keep up.

 

More than 1,460 new psychoactive substances have been reported in more than 150 countries and territories across the world, a vast majority in the last decade, according to the United Nations.

 

Just as science has made plastics, medicines and foods phenomenally more varied and abundant, it has revolutionized illicit substances. Once grown in the soil, dependent on rain, sun and crop cycles, illicit drugs today are increasingly formulated in laboratories, with very few constraints.

 

And with each iteration, the drugs grow more terrifying. It’s not just the overdoses and deaths they bring: Their incredible potency makes recovery much harder, deepening addiction and, by extension, the crisis it creates.

 

In dozens of interviews with users and treatment specialists in Estonia, everyone described a decades-long onslaught of debilitating new drugs that keep getting more destructive and harder to fight.

 

“Do you know why they call it the dog?” Irina Savina, 52, a nurse who helped launch a treatment center in Estonia, said of nitazenes.

 

“Because the nitazene addicts bark like dogs,” she said.

 

In their tortured battle with illicit drugs, the United States and its allies have arrested millions, while millions more have died from overdoses and drug-related violence driven by the trade.

 

Now, chemistry has completely upended the fight. Fentanyl is a central part of this global transformation and remains the biggest cause of drug-related deaths in the United States by far. But even if the country manages to halt the fentanyl crisis, as President Trump has promised, Estonia offers a harrowing lesson: Far more potent substances are already out there, ready to fill the void.

 

“We really thought the fentanyl period had taught us how to handle an opioid crisis,” said Kristin Mikko, a health coordinator in Estonia’s Ministry of Social Affairs. But the new drugs, she said, are “something different. They are so much more lethal.”

 

A Child Lost

 

On May 24, 2023, Jonas Meetua stopped off at Toompark, an expanse of lush greenery bordering the medieval center of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn.

 

He was on his way to a weight lifting competition but, as he had taken to doing, decided to get high first. He met a dealer by the central fountain and bought a single dose of nitazenes.

 

He stepped into a public toilet by the children’s playground, locked the door and lit up.

 

He died almost instantly, doctors say. When the police found his body in the bathroom the following day, his phone was still on his lap.

 

Six days later, the police used the phone to track down his dealer on the mobile app Telegram, where an encrypted illicit marketplace was flourishing.

 

It was a landmark case for the nation: For the first time, a dealer was charged with negligent homicide for selling a lethal dose, a pivotal shift for Estonian law enforcement. The man pleaded guilty and received almost four years in prison.

 

The sentencing came on Jonas’s birthday. He would have been 19.

 

“I didn’t want to celebrate his birthday in that way,” said his mother, Triin Trofimov, explaining why she avoided court that day.

 

His three younger brothers each dealt with the death in their own way.

 

Jan, then 11, locked himself in Jonas’s closet, sobbing as he searched for clothes that would fit. Lukas, 8 at the time, sent him text messages, asking him to come home. The youngest, Aron, not yet 3, spoke to the clouds, where his mother told him Jonas had gone.

 

Everything about Jonas had seemed normal, even healthy. Beyond his love of strongman competitions, he did well in school and talked often of the future, professing an interest in the military.

 

Guilt assailed his mother, a nurse. How could her oldest end up dying alone in a public toilet?

 

She knew Jonas occasionally smoked weed, and had even experimented with pills. Her ex-husband caught him once, and they began testing him for some drugs on a weekly basis, though not for something as new and extreme as nitazenes.

 

But Jonas and his friends had been secretly smoking them for months, taking extraordinary risks and, in some cases, paying dearly. Two friends had also died by overdose, and a third had barely survived.

 

After Jonas died, one of his friends told Ms. Trofimov that she would never understand the drugs’ appeal — the enveloping warmth and inner peace they summoned.

 

The friend even admitted that, one night, another friend had overdosed in her house while she was out. He and Jonas had dragged the boy across the street and called an ambulance to avoid getting in trouble. The boy nearly died.

 

Ms. Trofimov begged the friend to stop using. Hadn’t he seen enough to understand the risks, she asked him? Three young men were dead, and another nearly so. Why take the chance?

 

He told her the drugs were the only thing that cleared the confusion and anxiety, that quieted the turmoil, she recalled. He said he would rather die than quit.

 

Ms. Trofimov has stayed in touch with Jonas’s friends, even those he used with. One of them recently signed himself into rehab.

 

Every year, she invites them to a lake house to celebrate Jonas’s birthday. The kids, now young adults, descend for the weekend to barbecue and reminisce.

 

They leave behind a book of letters for Jonas, filled with memories of the past and missives from a present he is no longer there to see. She has three volumes now.

 

She cannot bear to read them.

 

A Cop’s View

 

The man in the gray sweatshirt crossed the street with the jumpy, disjointed movements and other hallmarks of addiction: gaunt face, crooked teeth, dirt-smeared clothing and a raggedy bandage over his left thumb.

 

Detective Maria Kougija, quietly posted on the thoroughfare, studied the photo of Sergei Tretjakov one more time. She wanted to be sure it was him.

 

It was the spring of 2025, and the drug police north of Tallinn had been tracking his movements, hunting the smugglers he was working for. On her signal, undercover officers collapsed from three directions, slamming the man to the sidewalk and hustling him behind a building.

 

They found less than two grams of off-white powder on him. It wasn’t exactly a major haul — a user-turned-dealer to support his own habit — yet it epitomized the toxic menace stalking Estonia.

 

Mr. Tretjakov, chatty and compliant, admitted that the drugs he used, and sold, were getting worse. His left thumb, rotting from a bad injection, was proof of that. Even he didn’t know what the drugs were, he added.

 

But when Detective Kougija sent the powder to the national forensic lab, it tested positive for a nitazene roughly six to nine times more potent than fentanyl.

 

Mr. Tretjakov was working for a dealer the Estonian authorities had put away almost a decade earlier for trafficking fentanyl. But classic policing — arrest the small player to inch closer to a larger target — was no longer enough. The drugs were changing too fast.

 

When Mr. Tretjakov’s supplier got arrested late last year, he was caught with a kilogram of nitazenes, but also 1.6 kilograms of the latest drug, cychlorphine — enough to cause eight million overdoses, the authorities said.

 

Yet cychlorphine was so new at the time that it wasn’t even illegal yet in Estonia; the authorities couldn’t charge him for it. The drug didn’t become banned in Estonia until this past spring.

 

“It makes our work harder,” Rait Pikaro, a former drug police head, said of the constantly shifting drug landscape. “It never stops.”

 

“It will take generations,” said Mr. Pikaro. His father, also a cop, was known as “the Midnight Bulldozer” and was shot while fighting organized crime after the end of Soviet rule.

 

“People will have to stop wanting to use,” he said. “That’s the only way it ends.”

 

Beating Back Fentanyl

 

Ago Leis, the top cop in the organized crime bureau, remembers how opium users drank poppy fluid when he first joined the police in 1993, right after Estonia emerged from Soviet rule in 1991.

 

He was a new officer, policing a new country. The force was so strapped for funds that officers often took buses to crime scenes. Yet the drug market was tame and overdoses relatively rare, even when heroin arrived in the late ’90s, he said.

 

“We never really had a problem with heroin,” he said. “Before 2000, we had maybe one seizure.”

 

Then, in 2002, Estonia tumbled into what many experts call the world’s first fentanyl crisis.

 

Fentanyl had just become known for a very different reason — as the mysterious gas Russia claimed it used to stun Chechen terrorists who seized a Moscow theater. The raid killed nearly 150 people, including more than 100 hostages, most of whom died from the gas.

 

Estonia, with its bitter history of Soviet occupation, began to suspect Russia for its drug crisis. But a different phenomenon was to blame — a regional shortage of heroin that struck when the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in 2000, before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

 

Baltic and Nordic states, at the end of many European trafficking routes, began running out of heroin, officials say. Finland’s market shifted to a less addictive substitute, provided to addicts by the government, while Estonia found itself stricken by fentanyl, a fever that didn’t break for the next 15 years.

 

“Fentanyl was all you could get,” Mr. Leis said.

 

Though Afghan poppy production quickly resumed, Estonia, far out on Europe’s eastern edge, was already hooked on fentanyl by then.

 

Once the market switched to synthetics, it never went back, officials said. Users were no longer satisfied with heroin; it was too weak. For dealers, fentanyl was cheaper to make and distribute, so far more profitable.

 

Estonia became the first nation to experience this brutal transition — forced to battle enigmatic substances with no playbook.

 

Now, experts worry, the rest of Europe could follow.

 

The Taliban is back in power and has banned poppy cultivation again. Many officials worry that Europe — which has an estimated one million opioid users but has largely escaped the fentanyl crisis, in part because of heroin stockpiles built up during the U.S. war in Afghanistan — may be heading toward a similar cliff.

 

“Most likely, there will be a heroin drought in Europe,” said Alexis Goosdeel, former president of the European Union Drug Agency. “A synthetic opioid will almost surely replace it.”

 

Nitazenes are already believed to have caused more than 1,000 deaths across Britain. The true numbers are certainly much higher, experts say; many toxicologists are not testing for nitazenes, or don’t have the equipment to do so.

 

Whatever comes next, it will undoubtedly stretch governments across the continent.

 

Estonia spent more than a decade chasing fentanyl, building the nation’s law enforcement machinery in the process.

 

After the Soviet Union collapsed, shale mines shuttered and industry crumbled, leaving hundreds of thousands of Russian speakers in Estonia jobless. Drug abuse soared, officials say.

 

Mr. Leis and other officers said they watched in despair as Estonia broke records, year after year, for drug-related deaths in Europe.

 

In 2008, they busted a major dealer and found a kilo of fentanyl drying on a pizza tin. Then, in 2012, a record year for overdose deaths, officials said they seized enough fentanyl to get the whole country high.

 

Nothing changed.

 

Fed up, Estonia created a fentanyl task force, beefed up forensic sciences and took aim at organized crime.

 

First, it brought down an empire helmed by a two brothers in 2017. Next, investigators broke up a crew of stealthy fentanyl traffickers who never used phones, took local buses to their meets and stashed drugs in forests.

 

In all, the authorities confiscated nearly 10 kilograms of fentanyl, enough to kill the entire nation four times over, officials said.

 

Soon, dealers started complaining that “you couldn’t get fentanyl” anymore, said Vahur Verte, then the state prosecutor for organized crime.

 

Overdose deaths plummeted. A cautious euphoria took hold. Suddenly, an end to the addiction crisis seemed within reach.

 

Then, in April 2019, a new peril showed up in a toxicology analysis: a nitazene.

 

It was the first appearance of the drug anywhere in Europe, according to the European Union Drug Agency.

 

Soon, scientists witnessed a crushing shift in the synthetic opioid supply.

 

More than a dozen nitazene analogues have since turned up in Estonia. In 2022, the overdose mortality rate more than doubled, and kept climbing to the highest levels in a decade.

 

Now, in an even faster succession, cychlorphine is replacing nitazenes.

 

In 2024, forensic scientists in Estonia did not find the class of opioid drugs associated with cychlorphine in a single test. But in 2025, those drugs killed more people than nitazenes did.

 

By April of this year, they had already killed more people than they did in all of 2025.

 

“We can do our job perfectly, but sooner or later this problem is going to return,” said Mr. Leis, the police official. “You can’t end this fight if you don’t go after addiction.”

 

Recovery

 

Light poured through the open skylights, bathing the walls. Sergei Kochegarov, 46, wandered the mall’s retail savanna, watching the shoppers.

 

Three months out of rehab and still clean, the slow work of unwinding the bitterness his addiction had caused was just beginning.

 

His personal life was now confined to basics: living at home with a sick mother, attending meetings with other recovering addicts, and employment where he could find it. His old clients, who once hired him to build kitchens and libraries, no longer trusted him, so he soldered garbage cans instead, grateful for the work.

 

He steered clear of old habits and new temptations, avoiding even the names of new drugs like cychlorphine.

 

“I heard that some new drugs have appeared but, you know, I’m not interested,” he said. “I try not to hear much.”

 

After a half-hour of aimlessly walking the mall, he realized he had been scanning faces for his daughter.

 

Nine months had passed since he had seen her, before entering rehab. He had heard from her just once, when she replied to one of his letters by saying she needed time.

 

At some point, he knew, they would run into each another. They lived in the same small town. There were only so many places to go.

 

He played out how their encounter might go. On darker days, he imagined her turning away. He needed things to be OK with her, to buttress the fragile equilibrium he reached in rehab.

 

The first month, coming off nitazenes, had been the hardest of his life. It was the worst drug he had ever tried, worse than heroin. Worse than fentanyl.

 

“The withdrawal from nitazenes is a lot worse,” he said. “But the worst thing about nitazenes is how fast you need more of it.”

 

With fentanyl, he didn’t obsess about using all the time, and could manage without it, he said.

 

“With nitazenes, it’s all you think about, all the time,” he said.

 

Everything about it came faster — his addiction, his tolerance, the withdrawals. When he began, one dose could provide 10 hits. After a month, he was using four doses a day.

 

“My fear of withdrawal was stronger than my fear of death,” he said. “It became all that mattered to me.”

 

When he hit bottom — after his divorce, after leaving his ex with almost everything — he turned up at the Viljandi Hospital, Estonia’s main rehab center.

 

He had gotten sober before and stayed clean for more than a decade, but he knew kicking nitazenes would be harder. The center’s staff knew, too.

 

“Their nervous system is more damaged,” a nurse there, Sire Ladima, said of nitazene addicts. “The physical pain is more severe.”

 

“Lots of the patients who come in with nitazene addictions leave the program early,” she added. “They can’t stand the withdrawal.”

 

For Mr. Kochegarov, routine helped: lectures, the gym, therapy. He saw a psychologist and acquired the language of recovery — the stark self-awareness, a desire to seek forgiveness, to forgive oneself.

 

When he left, he took the bus back home to the country’s northeast, where the majority of Russian speakers like himself live. He moved in with his mother, who has cancer, and immediately missed the predictability of rehab.

 

“Here, you have to do it yourself,” he said.

 

Plans hatched in recovery felt unrealistic back home. Resuming his career, making amends, financial and emotional stability: None of these came quickly. He realized that his primary focus should be navigating disappointment.

 

Estonia’s eastern region shares a border with Russia, across the Narva River. It is still the center of opioid use in the country, a battered former Soviet region where hulking relics of industry lie in ruin.

 

Mr. Kochegarov’s mother and father were members of the once-favored Russian community, but lost their jobs after the Soviet Union fell. His said his father became an alcoholic, and his mother worked all hours to support them. His older brother, now deceased, became involved in organized crime, which flourished in the collapse.

 

At 15, Mr. Kochegarov began using marijuana. A few years later, he was drinking poppy milk. Heroin followed, then fentanyl. In 2014, in his 30s, he got clean and stayed that way for a decade.

 

“I wanted a better life,” he said. “I saw how other people lived and wanted that normality.”

 

He married, built a family and devoted himself to work, becoming a master carpenter. But the long hours wore him down, and he began seeking something to relax. He started with beer, sure he could handle it. Within a few months, he was using methadone, diverted from opioid substitution centers and bought off the streets.

 

When the methadone was no longer strong enough for him, the only thing available was “the dog” — nitazenes. He spiraled quickly.

 

He steered clear of home, afraid he would sell whatever he could find to sustain the high, or that his daughter might see him. He vowed never to use around her.

 

She found out after he entered rehab, and then spoke to a psychologist there to help her process the trauma of it, he said.

 

He sent her two letters, one during rehab, which went unanswered, and the other right after, when she asked for more time.

 

Now he was meandering the shopping mall, hoping to run into her. He had put some effort into his appearance — clean shaven, with a pressed T-shirt, black jeans and a slim fitting leather jacket.

 

He peered through the glass facades of shoe stores, and scanned the tables of restaurants that spilled onto the esplanade.

 

And then, seated at one of the tables, he spotted her, her brown hair and slight frame, as if he had willed her into existence. He couldn’t move.

 

For all his preparations for this moment, he worried she might not want to see him, or be angered that he had ignored her request for space.

 

He tried to remember his steps, the tools he had learned to conquer his self-defeating tendencies. He found himself walking toward her, bracing for disappointment.

 

Suddenly, she saw him. Her face lit up instantly. She stood and smiled, then made a joke. He began to cry without realizing it.

 

She asked him about work, his life and whether he needed anything.

 

“Your attention, just a little bit,” he admitted.

 

He asked shyly if he could take a selfie with her, and when she said “yes,” he felt everything would be all right.” [1]

 

1. Estonia Won the War on Fentanyl. What Came Next Was Even Worse. Azam, Ahmed; Kohut, Meridith.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 7, 2026.