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An illustration shows a set of individually wrapped kilograms of fentanyl set on
a scale reading out 10.7 kilograms, with an annotation labeling the kilos with
the year 2014. As the page scrolls, the illustration zooms out to reveal an
enormous pile of wrapped kilos next to a customs officer and dog for size
reference. The pile towers over the officer, dog and scale, with a label that
reads 2022 next to it.




FAST, CHEAP AND DEADLY

How fentanyl replaced heroin and hooked America

By Jackie Botts
Published Aug. 9, 2023

Leer en Español

Reuters obtained and analyzed ten year’s worth of data on drugs seized by U.S.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at ports of entry along the southern
border.

The dataset provides more detail, over a longer period, than publicly available
CBP statistics. It includes over 85,000 individual drug seizure events,
providing a granular look at the scale and speed of the biggest shift in drug
smuggling in a generation. It shows:

 * Fentanyl seizures by weight more than tripled in the last quarter of 2022
   compared to a year earlier.

 * Heroin now makes up less than 7% of opioid doses seized at the border. Four
   years ago it was 80%.

 * Pills were mentioned in nearly half of fentanyl border seizure incidents in
   2022, up from just 6% five years earlier.

 * The median weight caught at the border of the concentrated, potent drug is
   just 1.2 kg (2.6 pounds). A fifth of seizures are from pedestrians.

Reuters consulted more than a dozen researchers and current and former Mexican
and U.S. government officials. The data analysis and reporting paint a picture
of Mexican drug trafficking organizations inundating the U.S. with ultrapotent
synthetic drugs, with fatal results for American users.

The shift has also caused upheaval in Mexico.

Cheap, easy-to-produce fentanyl has largely displaced heroin. Vast expanses of
remote poppy fields in the country’s western and southern mountain ranges, once
tended by poor farmers to make the plant-based narcotic, have been replaced with
small fentanyl laboratories, often in urban settings, reducing business risks
and increasing cartel profits.

In the U.S., the switch to fentanyl has been devastating. For every American who
has fatally overdosed from heroin with no synthetic opioid present, seven more
people died from an overdose involving a synthetic opioid since 2015, a total of
more than 325,000, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data analyzed
by Reuters shows.

“The global production potential for fentanyl is just astronomical”. . . as long
as precursor chemicals are available, the supply of the finished drug is
“virtually endless”

Bryce Pardo, research officer at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

The seizures data analyzed by Reuters reflects changes in trafficking patterns
and authorities’ sharper focus on fentanyl, experts and officials said. Indeed,
CBP and DEA say their recent priority on disrupting Mexican cartels’ fentanyl
operations has brought results.

CBP said investment in inspection systems, intelligence work and cross-agency
coordination had allowed it to “seize more fentanyl and arrest more criminals
for fentanyl-related crimes in the last two years than in the previous five
years combined.”

These efforts "disrupt drug trafficking, take the fight to smugglers, and
protect our communities against the scourge of fentanyl,” Acting CBP
Commissioner Troy Miller told Reuters in a statement.

Interdiction is typically thought to stop just 5% to 10% of the total quantity
of illicit drugs trafficked across the border, U.S. government officials say.

President Joe Biden has faced criticism that his administration has failed to
stop the flow of illicit drugs, with some Republican lawmakers advocating for
U.S. military action in Mexico against the cartels, sparking rebukes from
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Either way, “with the amount of death and destruction that (fentanyl is)
causing, we can't look at those seizures as successes,” said Chris Urben, a
high-ranking DEA agent until 2021 who is now a managing director at intelligence
firm Nardello & Co. Urben said agencies like the DEA and CBP require more
funding to take on fentanyl.

An illustration of a kilogram of fentanyl, wrapped for transport. As the page
scrolls, the kilogram fades into the taillight of a vehicle, noting that the
potency of fentanyl allows for smaller quantities to be smuggled and still be
devastating. The vehicle then zooms out to show it waiting in line at an
illustration of the thousands of cars waiting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.



Cheap and potent, fentanyl allows a “shotgun” trafficking approach, said Bryce
Pardo, research officer at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “Send
more couriers with smaller amounts.”

Most fentanyl trafficked by the Sinaloa Cartel crosses at U.S. border ports of
entry, often in secret car compartments, disguised among cargo on
tractor-trailers, or secreted in the bodies of drug mules, according to an April
indictment against the Chapitos, four brothers accused of expanding the Cartel’s
fentanyl operations following the capture of their father Joaquin ‘El Chapo’
Guzman.

“The Cartel relies on the impossibility of inspecting every item that crosses
the U.S.-Mexico border,” the indictment said.

Dozens of recent criminal cases illustrate this strategy. In April, a sniffer
dog at the El Paso port of entry alerted authorities to two bundles of blue
fentanyl pills concealed within rear quarter panels of a Ford Escape, according
to a criminal complaint.

A U.S. citizen walking through Arizona’s Nogales port of entry in June was
carrying 740 grams, in small bags taped to her coffee mug, tucked into her bra
and inserted in her vaginal cavity, court documents said. A fifth of fentanyl
seizures take place on pedestrians, the Reuters analysis shows.

CBP’s Miller said criminal organizations had evolved – hiding more fentanyl
ever-deeper in vehicles, blending-in with large volumes of traffic, and planting
“parasitic loads” on unsuspecting travelers – and the agency had adapted in
response. At ports of entry, CBP uses X-ray machines, density meters and sniffer
dogs among other strategies.

Opioid doses seized by opioid type at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico
border

100%

Heroin

80

60

40

20

Fentanyl

2012

2014

2016

2018

2020

2022

A chart showing that fentanyl has almost completely replaced heroin in opioid
seizures at ports of entry into the United States.



Fentanyl seizures at southern border ports of entry ticked up to 600 kg in 2018
before surging to 7,200 kg in 2022, extending a dramatic rise that began during
the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the same period, heroin seizures fell more than 80%
from over 2,000 kg, according to the Reuters analysis.

The port of entry seizures data analyzed by Reuters does not include seizures
along the vast stretches of the border between ports of entry, which represent a
minority of border seizures for most drugs including fentanyl and heroin.

Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy researcher and professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, said the speed of the switch revealed by the analysis was “striking”
because heroin had “utterly dominated” the illegal opioid market in the United
States for the last century.

In a further disruption of the business model of Mexico’s traditionally
wholesale traffickers, increasingly fentanyl is coming to the United States in
very low-purity pill form, highly profitable and potentially appealing to a
wider base of users.

The share of fentanyl border seizures that mention “pill” or “tablet” in the CBP
data was nearly half in 2022, up from just 6% in 2017, the Reuters analysis
shows. That trend has since accelerated, with pills making up the vast majority
of fentanyl border busts since October, a senior CBP intelligence official,
James Mandryck, said in a July congressional hearing.

In response to Reuters' questions, the DEA said that counterfeit pills laced
with fentanyl allow traffickers "to drive addiction and expand their business”,
adding that DEA lab testing reveals six out of 10 fentanyl-laced fake
prescription pills contain a potentially lethal dose.

An illustration of a fatal dose of fentanyl (2 milligrams) fills the screen, and
as the page scrolls, the fentanyl shrinks as a penny comes in from offscreen to
show the scale, with both shrinking to their relative actual size. The 2
milligrams of fentanyl is barely perceptible next to the penny, highlighting its
extreme potency.



First developed in 1959 as an intravenous anesthetic, fentanyl is legally
produced and widely used for pain relief. For users without a developed
tolerance, just 2 milligrams can be fatal.

Compared to heroin, it provokes a more intense initial rush of euphoria followed
by a stronger state of sedation. The high can wear off sooner, giving way to
painful withdrawal for dependent users.

Between 1990 and 2010, hundreds of thousands of Americans got hooked on highly
addictive prescription opioids like painkillers Oxycontin and Vicodin.

When regulators cracked down in the 2000s, many addicted users turned to heroin.
Heroin became a major earner for cartels who expanded opium poppy production
over vast areas of Mexico’s remote sierra regions.

Fentanyl took hold in the U.S. black market in 2014. Shipped by mail primarily
from China as high-purity powder, it was mixed into or marketed as heroin, a
cost-cutting strategy with deadly consequences. Overdoses surged.

China remained the dominant source of finished fentanyl until 2019 when Beijing,
under pressure from the United States, classified it as a controlled substance.
That year, the U.S. Postal Service increased monitoring, including by capturing
electronic data on more international shipments, investigating dark web
transactions and purchasing advanced detection equipment.

Mexican criminal organizations quickly filled the supply gap.

Fentanyl seizures by weight at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border

3,000 kg

2,000

1,000

0

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

A bar chart showing quarterly fentanyl seizures from 2015 to 2022, with almost
nothing showing on the 2015 side of the chart and a rapid escalation in 2020, to
over 2,000 kg a quarter in the final two bars.

“The opioid crisis of prescription painkillers I think created the market. The
Chinese (chemical suppliers) exacerbated and took advantage of that addict
pool,” said former DEA agent Urben. “And now you have the greatest drug
trafficking organization in the history of the world, the Mexican cartels…
exploiting it to a whole ‘nother level.”

In response to questions about China’s role in the U.S. fentanyl crisis, the
Chinese Foreign Ministry said that it strictly regulated production of fentanyl
and other chemically similar substances. It said Washington should take concrete
measures to limit overprescribing, and reduce demand.

Mexican authorities have boasted raids of large-scale fentanyl pill pressing
operations in the past year. However, critics say President Lopez Obrador has
not done enough to confront narcotrafficking.

The Mexican government did not respond to Reuters’ questions. Lopez Obrador
denies fentanyl is produced in Mexico, although a video presented by his office
in April said the government had located 37 sites where final-stage precursors
were converted into finished fentanyl and pressed into pills.

Mexico's Security Minister Rosa Rodriguez said in the July meeting of the
Trilateral Fentanyl Committee between North American leaders that Mexico was
committed to disrupting the operations of fentanyl trafficking organizations.

Detection of heroin has dropped 76%

Among drugs seized within the U.S. between 2015 and 2022 according to the DEA’s
National Forensic Laboratory Information System

The flip from heroin to fentanyl at the border is reflected in many U.S. drug
markets, where heroin has largely disappeared, studies show, while fentanyl
abounds, sold on its own, laced into drugs such as cocaine, or pressed into
counterfeit blue pills, often bearing the characters “M” and “30” to look like
the painkiller oxycodone.

On U.S. streets, DEA data shows a 76% drop in detection of heroin in drugs
seized by law enforcement in the first half of 2015 to just 22,500 samples in
the first half of 2022.

This deluge is a cartel business strategy made possible by fentanyl’s potency
and profitability, experts said.

“You can essentially flood certain areas with the substance and then create a
demand,” said Cecilia Farfan-Mendez, an organized crime expert at the University
of California San Diego.

An illustration shows a masked man stirring a pot with a large paddle, cooking
fentanyl. As the page zooms out, it shows how much space is needed to cook a
kilogram of fentanyl (18 square meters) compared to how much space is needed for
a kilo of pure heroin (1 hectare). The cook dissappears in the hectare, which is
1000 meters across but then the page zooms out again, showing 50 hectare squares
and noting that since pure fentanyl is about 50 times more potent than pure
heroin, you would need 50 hectares to match the amount.



Fentanyl is part of a larger trend as Mexican gangs phase out plant-based drugs
in favor of potent synthetic narcotics.

Plant-based drugs require control of land, usually by paying off authorities and
wielding violence. Farmers must be paid to plant, tend, harvest and process
crops.

Drought or rain can destroy a season, as can law enforcement. Transporting
product to the U.S. border requires navigating authorities and competing
criminal organizations.

By contrast, methamphetamine and fentanyl can be produced in small spaces with
basic equipment. In jungles or city apartments, labs are easily hidden. Freed
from the whims of nature, a “cook” can produce the substances in days,
year-round.

As long as precursor chemicals are available, the supply of the finished drug is
“virtually endless,” said Pardo. “The global production potential for fentanyl
is just astronomical.”

Methamphetamine seizures grew six-fold between 2015 and 2021, but fell by nearly
40% in 2022 when fentanyl captures soared. At the same time, the weight of
marijuana seizures at border ports of entry plummeted by 99% as U.S. states
legalized the drug, the Reuters analysis shows. Cocaine remains resolutely
popular, the data suggests, possibly reflecting a lack of synthetic
alternatives.

Seizure events for the five most common drugs at ports of entry along the
U.S.-Mexico border

100%

Plant-based drugs

Cocaine

75

Marijuana

Heroin

50

Synthetic drugs

25

Fentanyl

Methamphetamine

0

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

A chart illustrating the breakdown of seizures by type of drug, with plant based
drugs (cocaine, marijuana and heroin) shrinking considerably, while synthetic
drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamines have taken over.

Land dedicated to poppy cultivation in Mexico declined by a third between 2017
and 2021, according to U.S. government estimates.

In rural southern Mexico, opium prices collapsed, said Romain Le Cour, from
research institute Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. Le
Cour, who has done fieldwork with poppy farmers, said poverty increased.

“Houses were empty in parts of the villages because people had to emigrate to
look for jobs.”

While Mexico and the United States have regulated the principal fentanyl
precursors, criminal chemists have innovated new routes to synthesize fentanyl
from unregulated “pre-precursors.” Other chemicals used in fentanyl synthesis
are also used in the manufacture of household products including paint, rubber,
herbicides, and common medicines such as Ibuprofen.

Chemists share recipes on the dark web, where they can also connect with
precursor suppliers in China and other Asian countries. According to DEA
research, most fentanyl seized by U.S. authorities today is produced via the
“Gupta method”, using a single pot.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to Reuters’ questions about the
country’s role in the trade of fentanyl precursors, but said it collaborates
with Mexico on “anti-drug law enforcement.”

Around 2014, soon after Chinese fentanyl appeared in U.S. markets, the Sinaloa
Cartel began cooking the drug “in a single makeshift lab located within a modest
house”, according to the Chapitos indictment.

By 2022, the Chapitos boasted a profit margin “approximately 200 to 800 times”
the cost of the precursors, the indictment said. Spending $800 on a kilo of
chemicals from China, it said they pressed around 415,000 fentanyl pills. On
U.S. streets each pill might sell for $3.

The 2022 final report of the U.S. Congress’ Commission on Combating Synthetic
Opioid Trafficking estimated gross cartel fentanyl revenues of $700 million to
$1 billion annually, less than its estimate that heroin revenue grossed $1.3
billion annually in its heyday. However, fentanyl overheads are lower.

While the DEA says the Sinaloa and New Generation Jalisco cartels currently
supply most fentanyl consumed in the United States, Carlos Perez, a professor at
the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City, said the
drug’s low cost and simple production has attracted more players, fueling
violence in cartel-dominated areas of Mexico.

“Fentanyl is a game changer,” said Perez.

DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND ART DIRECTION BY

Travis Hartman

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

Catherine Tai

CHARTS BY

Julia Wolfe

ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY

Drazen Jorgic

EDITED BY

Stephen Eisenhammer, Julia Wolfe, Frank Jack Daniel and Janet Roberts

METHODOLOGY




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