{"id":77898,"date":"2024-09-06T15:11:13","date_gmt":"2024-09-06T21:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/?p=77898"},"modified":"2024-09-06T15:11:13","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T21:11:13","slug":"crime-awareness-we-bought-everything-needed-to-make-3-million-worth-of-fentanyl-all-it-took-was-3600-and-a-web-browser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/06\/crime-awareness-we-bought-everything-needed-to-make-3-million-worth-of-fentanyl-all-it-took-was-3600-and-a-web-browser\/","title":{"rendered":"Crime Awareness: We Bought Everything Needed to make $3 million worth of Fentanyl. All it took was $3,600 and a web browser"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We bought everything needed to make $3 million worth of fentanyl. All it took was $3,600 and a web browser<\/a><\/h1>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

At the tap of a buyer\u2019s 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 \u2013 and reveal how drug traffickers are eluding efforts to halt the deadly trade behind the fentanyl crisis.<\/em><\/h2>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A cardboard box<\/span>\u00a0half the size of a loaf of bread bore a shipping label declaring its contents: \u201cAdapter.\u201d It was\u00a0delivered\u00a0in October to a Reuters reporter in Mexico City.<\/h2>\n

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\u2019s a core ingredient of fentanyl. It was enough to produce 750,000 tablets of the deadly drug.<\/h2>\n

A Reuters reporter had ordered the chemical six weeks earlier from a seller in China. The sales assistant, \u201cJenny,\u201d used a photo of a Chinese actress as her screen avatar. The price was $440, payable in Bitcoin, delivery by air freight included.<\/h2>\n

\u201cWe can ship safely to Mexico,\u201d Jenny had written in Spanish on the encrypted message platform Telegram in July 2023, when the reporter first inquired about the chemical. \u201cNo one knows what we ship.\u201d<\/h2>\n

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\u2019s killing tens of thousands of Americans a year, has become an endlessly inventive and ruthlessly efficient global industry.<\/h2>\n

The trade hinges on chemicals known as \u201cprecursors,\u201d which are the drug\u2019s essential ingredients. Compounds called piperidines are the core of fentanyl\u2019s structure. Other precursors provide the remaining building blocks. Combined through chemical reactions, these precursors create a drug\u00a050 times stronger than heroin.<\/h2>\n

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.\u00a0Tightly restricting all of them would upend global commerce. And because of fentanyl\u2019s potency, even small quantities of these precursors can produce vast numbers of tiny pills using a simple manufacturing process \u2013 rendering the ingredients, the final product and the supply chain easy to conceal from authorities.<\/h2>\n

Anyone with a mailbox, an internet connection and digital currency to pay the tab can source these chemicals, a Reuters investigation found.<\/h2>\n

RTWT<\/a><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We bought everything needed to make $3 million worth of fentanyl. All it took was $3,600 and a web browser   At the tap of a buyer\u2019s 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 \u2013 and reveal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[13,3688,1928,3986,14086,7180],"tags":[17940,8490,7984,9408,7064,17939,9063],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77898"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77901,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77898\/revisions\/77901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}