People forced to bring overdose-reversal drug naloxone from US, as critics accuse Mexican government of creating shortage

Every day, people cross the US-Mexico border with drugs – but not all of them are going north. Some head in the opposite direction with a hidden cargo of naloxone, a life-saving medicine that can reverse an opioid overdose but is so restricted as to be practically inaccessible in Mexico.

This humanitarian contraband is necessary because Mexico’s border cities have their own problems with opioid use – problems that activists and researchers say are being made more deadly by government policy.

“Mexico has long seen itself as a production and transit country, but not a place of consumption,” said Cecilia Farfán Méndez, a researcher at the University of California at San Diego. “And a lot of the conversation is still around that being a US problem – not a Mexican one.”

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In response to the fentanyl crisis, authorities in the US made naloxone available without a prescription. Naloxone vending machines have proliferated across the country.

But in Mexico naloxone remains strictly controlled – despite the efforts of some senators from Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s own party, Morena, who proposed a law to declassify it.

The president, popularly known as AMLO, has criticised naloxone, asking whether it did any more than “prolong the agony” of addicts, and questioning who stood to profit from its sale.