Illicit fentanyl is sometimes made in the United States. It sometimes comes into the country on planes or boats. Most commonly, however, it enters in one of three ways: through the mail, from China; across the border, from Canada; or across the border, from Mexico.
Fentanyl and analogues arriving via postal carriers directly from China tend to be of the highest purity—90 percent or higher. Most fentanyl analogues used in America, as well as most other NPS and fentanyl precursors, originate from mail shipments from China. Much of Canada’s fentanyl arrives in the mail from China, and some of that is smuggled across the US border, which is more open than the US’s border with Mexico.
While the majority of the pure, uncut fentanyl arriving to the United States comes from China in the mail, the majority of fentanyl by weight enters the U.S. from Mexico, either as pressed pills, in powder form, or mixed into other drugs. This fentanyl from Mexico is adulterated, and already contains a cutting agent like caffeine, quinine, or Benadryl. Its purity is thus much lower. According to the DEA, fentanyl seized at the US border with Mexico averages about 7 percent purity (which, of course, is still plenty strong enough to do major damage).
The cartels’ fentanyl business is still in its nascent stage, said Mike Vigil, a retired DEA chief of international operations, who worked in Mexico. He believes that in the coming years an even larger percentage of US fentanyl will come from Mexico. “With any enterprise that is getting into another line of business, it doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s just a question of time before they dominate that market,” he said. “They already have the existing distribution channels. I think more cartels will be involved, as well as criminal groups that aren’t necessarily cartels but will see the money involved.”
Having campaigned on a border wall to slow illegal immigration, as president, Donald Trump contended a wall would help abate the opioid crisis, but experts doubted that assertion, because the majority of fentanyl arriving from Mexico comes through the forty-eight official port of entry border crossings. These wholesale packages of fentanyl are most often concealed in vehicles—stashed in secret panels or in gas tanks, often alongside legitimate cargo like produce—and brought through official border crossings into California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Some is carried through secret, elaborately engineered underground passages, with sophisticated lighting and ventilation systems. El Chapo masterminded the first such tunnel, between Tijuana and San Diego, in 1989. The aboveground crossing between those two areas remains the favorite of his Sinaloa cartel and its rivals, judging by the quantities of drug seizures. In December 2017, a nineteen-year-old college student from Tijuana was caught trying to smuggle seventy-eight pounds of fentanyl in his car through the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. In August 2018, a thirty-nine-year-old US citizen living in Tijuana named Fernando Jesus Peraza was discovered with more than twenty thousand fentanyl pills at the San Ysidro crossing. He pled guilty.
As fentanyl use has increased, the drug is being seized more often. While customs officials seized only about 1 kilogram of fentanyl in 2013, that number rose to 674 kilograms in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics were available. In August 2017, American officials found what looked like thirty thousand oxycodone pills in a vehicle outside Tempe, Arizona; they were actually fentanyl pills and reportedly a product of the Sinaloa cartel. Just a week later Mexican officials seized 140 pounds of fentanyl powder inside a truck rig in Sonora, just yards south of the border near Yuma, Arizona, along with another thirty thousand fentanyl pills. In January, 2019, 115 kg of fentanyl was seized by the US Customs and Border Protections from a truck at the Nogales, Arizona, border crossing, in what the agency described as the largest fentanyl bust in history.
Once the fentanyl arrives in the United States, it gets sent inland to mid-level regional distributors, to be broken down into smaller packages. “We’re the main stopping point for the majority of Sinaloa cartel drugs that come across,” said Doug Coleman, of the DEA, referencing Arizona. “They come to Phoenix or Tucson first, then a piece of them is shipped to meet local market, and the rest is shipped off to the rest of the United States.” The drivers aren’t usually official cartel members, but often Mexican American subcontractors who are in the United States legally. They take the drugs to other parts of the country using similar routes for cocaine and heroin, but fentanyl is much easier to transport, owing to its small size. “Law enforcement is set up to find volume,” said journalist Deborah Bonello, an expert on Mexican drug cartels. “They’re not going to tear up a vehicle to find a tiny quantity. I think that’s something the cartels are hip to and they exploit.”
St. Louis County drug enforcement detective Ricardo Franklin described elaborate schemes used by dealers to transport the drugs across country. “If state troopers are running interdiction, the dealers might have a car with a very large package and then another decoy car with a small package. The car with the smaller package will make a silly maneuver to get the officer’s attention and get pulled over, so the car with the larger amount can carry on.”
These shipments are driven to major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, with stops along the way in satellites like St. Louis. There, they are subdivided further and farmed out to regional and mid-level traffickers, who tend to have gang affiliations. Some Sinaloa cartel members are moving into American neighborhoods, to broaden their business and exert more control over supply chains. In June 2017, Omar Zeus Rodriguez, a Sinaloa native believed to be tied to that region’s cartel, was arrested by New Jersey State Police with five kilograms of fentanyl in his Range Rover; he lived on a quiet street in a New Jersey town called Willingboro, outside Philadelphia. “They’re in sleepy towns,” said Larry Williams, a New Jersey State Police detective, speaking of cartel members living in New Jersey. “They’d rather be in a Willingboro or another place where they can’t be robbed or can’t be found. They want to blend into their surroundings.” Despite the cartels’ reputation for bloody warfare in Mexico, they understand that violence doesn’t play in the United States. “They’re smart,” said Jimmy Arroyo, a DEA special agent working to disrupt Mexican drug trafficking. “They know that if they kill people, they will attract attention.”
In more rural communities that don’t have traditional gang structures, the regional distributors might be more like extended families. “Places like West Virginia have these relatively new distribution gangs, where it’s a family that operates it, and the members usually have opioid-use disorders,” said Mario Moreno, former press secretary for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “They maintain their habit while selling fentanyl on the streets.”
After the fentanyl arrives to the mid-level regional distributors, it is divided up again for local dealers, who sell it directly to customers. This is where Jack Sanders came in.
Having been convinced fentanyl was a moneymaker, Marcus and Jack continued accepting more packages of the powder from the Mexicans, along with their usual shipments. These bundles were no longer free but still a good deal. Whereas a gram of heroin might have cost eighty dollars, they paid a maximum of only forty dollars for a gram of fentanyl. After combining the fentanyl and the heroin in the Mr. Coffee grinder and blending it, the crew would cut the blend even further, mixing in a healthy amount of the sleep-aid Dormin, which, like Benadryl, contains the antihistamine diphenhydramine.
After finishing the blend, Marcus, Jack, and their underlings would cap the mixture—make it into capsules, or “beans.” This was tedious work. “The guys hate doing it, because it takes so long,” Jack said. “I would wear gloves. [Marcus] wore a doctor’s mask and gloves. I was like, ‘Dude, what’s up with the doctor’s mask?’ But he was smart.” Accidently ingesting even a tiny amount of the drug can cause grave health problems. They used one gram of fentanyl for every seven grams of heroin; by diluting the fentanyl in this way, Jack believed they were precisely controlling the product they were putting on the street.
But what he didn’t realize was that the shipments they were receiving from Mexico had already been cut, perhaps also with diphenhydramine, though he didn’t know the exact cutting agent. In fact, Marcus and Jack had no idea how much actual fentanyl was in each particular shipment they received. The only way they could have known the chemical makeup of their batches was if they had access to expensive mass-spectrometry equipment to test the chemical components.
The Mexican cartels preparing the fentanyl tend to use crude methods. “It’s not like they’re in a laboratory and measuring how much is in it, they just take the fentanyl and stir it with a spoon,” said Doug Coleman of the DEA. “So you may take one hit with 1 milligram of fentanyl, and next you take a hit with 7 milligrams of fentanyl in it.”
The same thing occurs today, across the country, even as the cartels become more scientifically sophisticated. Other than those who cut up the original product, nobody knows how much pure fentanyl is in the powders and pills being sold on the street. The cartel affiliates who drive the product across the border don’t know, nor do the distributors who drive the packages for delivery around the country nor the local dealers selling them on the streets nor the users themselves.
This lack of dosage information, at root, is the primary cause for the fentanyl overdose crisis, the reason so many people are dying.
“It’s like playing Russian roulette,” said assistant US attorney James Delworth, who is based in St. Louis and heads the region’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force. “There’s no quality control in drug dealing. The way these products are cut with fentanyl is not in any way scientific. When users get it from a dealer who’s gotten it from a distributor who’s gotten it from another distributor, they’re not going to have any idea what the strength is.”
Around 2014, Jack Sanders was plying his wares in a North St. Louis neighborhood called Mark Twain. It’s one of the most dangerous parts of the city and just a short drive from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, one of America’s largest oxycodone manufacturers. At night, he squatted in an apartment building owned by a derelict landlord. It was a bare-bones existence. “There was water,” he said. “There was no heat. You turn the stove on and open it for heat.” His pit bull served as his burglar alarm. Though he stood out as a white guy from the suburbs, he could move about freely in the area, he said, because he had won the trust of local dealers by giving them free marijuana procured from a fellow Phish fan. “I could go into projects and walk in safely, walk out safely, without even having to have my gun on me, though I always would,” Sanders said.
He sold his heroin and fentanyl just steps from where he slept, on North Kingshighway Boulevard, near where Bree got her fentanyl from a different dealer and about six miles north of the old Magic Chef factory. Jack’s capped-up heroin and fentanyl beans were dispensed in ziplock bags with designs on them—hearts on the heroin bags and skulls on the fentanyl bags. All beans cost the same: five dollars each or a hundred dollars for twenty. (The heroin beans were actually a mixture of heroin and fentanyl.)
Customers would drive up, or arrive on foot, and place their orders with him. He’d take their cash and direct them to the “trap house” nearby, the place where the drugs were kept. “A trap house could be anything from an abandoned house to somebody’s grandma’s house,” Sanders said. He wouldn’t keep any drugs on him, but at the trap house, a teenager—maybe fifteen or sixteen—would give the customer the beans. The boys were chosen specifically for their young ages, “because he’d go to juvenile hall, not prison.” For payment, Sanders said he gave them cash or bought them clothes or fancy sneakers.
The crew always feared violence, but Jack was guarded by “sentries”—armed watchmen posted nearby, keeping watch. “They’d basically get out a lawn chair and drink beer,” Sanders said, adding that they would stash their big guns in a planter or a bush nearby, or even bury them under a bit of sand. Whenever they drew police attention, or someone got arrested, they would switch corners and trap houses.
How did he rationalize all this, the violence, the selling of poison, the exploitation of children? “I didn’t feel anything. When you’re addicted, you have no remorse. I didn’t have a conscience,” he said.
The cartels are often thought of as pyramidal in structure, with a powerful boss calling the shots. That style has begun to erode, particularly with El Chapo’s arrest. The chain of command is not as powerful as it once was. “There’s been this very severe fragmentation,” said Deborah Bonello. “Power is now distributed more horizontally than vertically.”
“The Sinaloa cartel has expanded to over forty countries, and it operates very much like McDonalds,” said Mike Vigil, the retired DEA chief of international operations. “Subsidiaries in places like Belgium or France or Spain run their distribution networks, but they buy their product from the parent company, which is Sinaloa.”
Jalisco Nueva Generation has suffered from internal division, and, owing to its especially brutal way of doing business and targeting of Mexican police officers, the Mexican government is particularly focused on the cartel, Vigil said. This gives Sinaloa greater leverage to operate, even with its leader out of commission. When El Chapo was extradited to the United States, a bloody inter-cartel war broke out that was won by Guzmán’s family members and a senior leader named Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. But despite the chaos, cartel business has continued unabated. “Sinaloa continues to be the most powerful cartel, even though El Chapo Guzmán has been taken out of the picture,” said Mike Vigil.
In the United States, fentanyl has been hugely profitable for the cartels, and despite its staggering death count, it may have only scratched the surface. So far fentanyl has disproportionately affected the eastern part of the country, likely because, east of the Mississippi River, white powder heroin is more common and can be easily mixed in with white fentanyl powder. In the West, on the other hand, black tar heroin has long dominated, and it is more difficult to mix with fentanyl. St. Louis, located directly on the Mississippi, has seen both over the years, though white powder heroin is now more common. The predominance of black tar heroin out West is likely why, in San Francisco, users report that fentanyl is often clearly labeled as such, rather than being cut into heroin. There are indications, however, that dealers are beginning to find ways to mix black tar heroin and fentanyl, and that white heroin is moving West. These trends appear to be causing the fentanyl epidemic to surge in previously unaffected areas; the CDC notes that eight states west of the Mississippi are now showing “significant increases” in synthetic-opioid deaths, including Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and California.
And though many heroin users have by now encountered fentanyl, users of prescription pills still represent a largely untapped market. “Heroin has a much smaller using population than prescription pills,” said Mario Moreno, former press secretary for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “If the cartels can tap into the people who are misusing OxyContin and Vicodin and Percocet and can turn them into people who prefer fentanyl, they’re going to make a lot of money.”
Mike Vigil predicts that the Mexican cartels will eventually do away with heroin entirely. “They take a lot of risk of their opium poppy fields being eradicated,” he said. “But with fentanyl, it’s a huge profit-making drug with much less risk.”
A February, 2019, investigative study on the Mexican fentanyl trade by InSight Crime concluded: “Mexico’s government does not see fentanyl as an important issue yet and has not devoted significant resources towards finding the principal drivers of the trade inside its borders.”
With sky-high US demand for illegal drugs coupled with a depressed Mexican economy, the cartels will continue to bloody their rivals and innocent parties throughout Mexico. They will continue to absorb young men into their ranks, who will opt for the status and money offered by the cartels rather than the low wages and lack of opportunity offered by the legal economy. “They have this saying here, ‘Más vale vivir cinco años como rey que cincuenta como guey,’” said Deborah Bonello. It’s better to live five years as a king, than fifty as a loser.