Mexico City

The growing number of young Americans dying due to drug overdose is because the families in the United States do not hug their kids enough, Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said while referring to the ongoing fentanyl crisis in the U.S. whose origin is blamed on Mexican drug cartels. 

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Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid drug, which the drug control authorities in the United States say, comes from Mexico. Fentanyl overdose results in about 70,000 deaths in the United States every year.

The Mexican president denied the accusation that Mexico produces fentanyl, adding that the family systems have broken down in the United States and parents do not let their children live at home long enough up to a certain age.

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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's comments came on Friday when he was addressing a news briefing. The Mexican president said that the U.S. drug overdose deaths emerge from "a lack of hugs, of embraces." Associated Press reported.

"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," López Obrador said of the U.S. crisis. "That is why they (U.S. officials) should be dedicating funds to address the causes."

In the past as well, López Obrador has repeatedly said that Mexico’s tightly-held family values continue to save it from the wave of fentanyl overdoses. 

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Experts cited in the U.S. media claim that Mexican cartels make so much money from the U.S. market that they see no need to sell fentanyl in their home market.

Methamphetamines, a class of synthetic drugs, is seen to purportedly help work people work harder despite the lack of peer-reviewed scientific data on the same.

Amid the Republicans' calls for military action on drug cartels, López Obrador has retorted to the calls in the United States to designate Mexican drug gangs as terrorist organisations. 

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Earlier on Wednesday, López Obrador called anti-drug policies in the U.S. a failure. The Mexican president proposed a ban in both countries on using fentanyl in medicine.

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 anaesthesia in surgeries and other procedures.

Most illegal fentanyl is pressed by Mexican cartels into counterfeit pills made to look like other medications like Xanax, oxycodone, or Percocet.

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