At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills. Such deals are astonishingly easy – and reveal how drug traffickers are eluding efforts to halt the deadly trade behind the fentanyl crisis.
A cardboard box half the size of a loaf of bread bore a shipping label declaring its contents: “Adapter.” It was delivered in October to a Reuters reporter in Mexico City.
There was no adapter inside that package. Instead, sealed in a metallic Mylar bag was a plastic jar containing a kilogram of 1-boc-4-piperidone, a pale powder that’s a core ingredient of fentanyl. It was enough to produce 750,000 tablets of the deadly drug.
A Reuters reporter had ordered the chemical six weeks earlier from a seller in China. The sales assistant, “Jenny,” used a photo of a Chinese actress as her screen avatar. The price was $440, payable in Bitcoin, delivery by air freight included.
“We can ship safely to Mexico,” Jenny had written in Spanish on the encrypted message platform Telegram in July 2023, when the reporter first inquired about the chemical. “No one knows what we ship.”
Transactions like this are part of the biggest upheaval in the global narcotics trade since the war on drugs began half a century ago. The manufacturing of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that’s killing tens of thousands of Americans a year, has become an endlessly inventive and ruthlessly efficient global industry.
The trade hinges on chemicals known as “precursors,” which are the drug’s essential ingredients. Compounds called piperidines are the core of fentanyl’s structure. Other precursors provide the remaining building blocks. Combined through chemical reactions, these precursors create a drug 50 times stronger than heroin.
The problem for regulators: Many of the same chemicals used to make fentanyl are also crucial to legitimate industries, from perfumes and pharmaceuticals to rubber and dyes. Tightly restricting all of them would upend global commerce. And because of fentanyl’s potency, even small quantities of these precursors can produce vast numbers of tiny pills using a simple manufacturing process – rendering the ingredients, the final product and the supply chain easy to conceal from authorities.
Anyone with a mailbox, an internet connection and digital currency to pay the tab can source these chemicals, a Reuters investigation found.
