BEIJING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- A 78-second footage showing droves of homeless addicts aimlessly staggering through the streets, surrounded by tents and scattered trash in the United States, has swept the internet and surprised the world.

 

The shocking footage, like a nightmarish scene in the "Resident Evil" movies, revealed the drug-infested hellhole on the streets of Philadelphia, the most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, according to British newspaper Daily Mail.

 

The Kensington neighborhood, dubbed "ground zero" for the city's drug crisis, is now seen littered with zombie-like addicts.

 

"I've never seen human beings remain in these kinds of conditions," Sarah Laurel, executive director of an outreach organization Savage Sisters, was quoted as saying by the report. "They have open, gaping wounds and they can't walk."

 

"It is sad to see the state of the U.S. at the moment," sammy151, an Australian cybernaut from the Central Coast New South Wales, said in a comment under the article.

 

"ZOMBIE DRUG"

 

The horrific streetscape was caused by the flood of xylazine, also known as "tranq" or "zombie drug," which is a non-opioid agent that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) originally approved in 1972 as a sedative and analgesic for use in veterinary medicine, but now it has become an object of desire in the eyes of addicts to intensify the effects of heroin, fentanyl and cocaine.

 

Between 2020 and 2021, xylazine detection figures from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have seen a dramatic increase of almost 200 percent in the southern part of the United States, and of more than 100 percent in the western part. On April 12, the U.S. administration designated fentanyl combined with xylazine as an "emerging threat" to the country.

 

When people use these drugs, they can experience serious side effects. Some of the symptoms that have led to the use of the term "zombie drug" include states of extreme confusion, violent and aggressive behavior, loss of coordination, hallucinations, and even psychotic episodes, French media website VL reported earlier in June.

 

The "zombie drug" can depress "breathing, blood pressure, heart rate" and reduce "body temperature to critical levels," warns the FDA, pointing out that people who inject drugs containing xylazine can develop severe skin wounds and patches of dead and rotting tissue that may lead to amputation.

 

"These wounds were a lot deeper, a lot more severe, there were big necrotic areas ... Sometimes you can see the bones, and we were starting to see more patients that were requiring amputations," Joseph D'Orazio, an emergency physician and addiction medicine specialist at Temple University Hospital, told CNN.

 

DYSTOPIAN REALITY

 

Like many cities in nearly 50 other states, a similar scenario is playing out in San Francisco, with personal stories of drug addicts laid out on the streets and violent assaults frequently told by residents and business owners, reported Fox News Digital last week.

 

"It honestly feels like I'm in a place that's been in a zombie apocalypse. It's like a dystopia. It really feels like a dystopian reality right now where I see boarded up storefronts. I see people defecating on the streets," said Seema Gokhale, a resident who lives near the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco and has been in the city for almost a decade.

 

A newly released report out of the San Francisco Controller's office found nearly half of the city's commercial sidewalks had feces on them in 2021 and into 2022.

 

"This is once a very great, thriving metropolis. It's now just a wasteland. Come here and look around at the businesses. Look at the shops that are close to the small neighborhood businesses that are boarded up. Thirty percent of the office retail space downtown is now empty," Tony Hall, a former city councilman and business owner, was quoted by Fox News Digital as saying.

 

WASHINGTON'S INCOMPETENCE

 

"I can't believe anyone would even try a drug that could cause this. Lord have mercy!" sighed Vickie Fields, an American Facebook user from Ravenswood of West Virginia, who reposted with comments photos of a man losing his fingers.

 

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 107,375 people in the United States died of drug overdoses and drug poisonings in the 12-month period ending in January 2022, with a staggering 67 percent of them involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

 

"This is the price of liberalism. Society needs rules and regulations and they need to be enforced," said a British netuser by the name of BugKhan from Bradford.

 

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in April questioned the U.S. strategy against the fentanyl crisis, saying it was relying on "palliatives" instead of tackling the root of the problem.

 

The best strategy is to address why so many are using and abusing opioids in the United States, said Lopez Obrador.

 

The U.S. measure reflects "simplistic thinking" in the face of a complex problem, said Mexico's Undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion Hugo Lopez-Gatell.

 

It reveals a lack of interest in tackling social problems, such as entrenched inequality and absence of opportunities, especially for the young, said Lopez-Gatell.

 

"The root cause of the U.S. fentanyl crisis lies at home," said Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin to a press conference on Thursday.

 

The United States needs to reflect on itself, strengthen regulation and control of prescription drugs at home, step up public awareness campaigns about the harm of narcotics, and reduce domestic demand for drugs, instead of smearing and discrediting other countries to shift the blame, Wang said.

 

Guided by the humanitarian spirit, China has worked with the United States to help solve its fentanyl abuse. In May 2019, China became the first country in the world to officially schedule fentanyl-related substances as a class, which played an important role in preventing the illicit manufacturing, trafficking and abuse of the substance.