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Americans may remember 2022 for events like Hurricane Ian, Uvalde’s mass shooting and the Supreme Court‘s abortion ruling. But beneath the headlines, a poorly understood drug stealthily spread its dark shadow across the country.
Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, emerged as the silent killer driving a 44 percent rise in overdose deaths, which reached 107,000 in the 12 months to January 2022 — more than gun and motor vehicle deaths combined.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says fentanyl and its chemical copycats caused about two thirds of those deaths — often young people who thought they were taking something less powerful.
Drug enforcement efforts had started to tame America’s opioid epidemic by cracking down on the so-called ‘pill mills’ that doled out prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet and kickstarted the crisis in the early 2000s.
But this latest phase of addiction involving fentanyl has been more deadly and difficult to control, due in large part to the potency of the drug, which packs down small and is easy to mail or smuggle across borders.
The drug was initially produced in India and China and mailed to recipients across North America. Makeshift labs have since sprung up in Mexico to receive the precursor chemicals from Asia, mix them or press them into pills, and smuggle them into the US
This image from Mexico’s national defense forces shows a makeshift drugs lab in northwest Mexico, where officers discovered precursor chemicals, fentanyl paste, weapons and drug making gear, from November 2021
Fentanyl is 50-100 times stronger than morphine. By one estimate, a year’s supply of pure fentanyl powder for America’s market would fit in the beds of two pickup trucks.
The US opioid crisis has been surging for decades but intensified in the pandemic, when lockdowns and hospital closures left people particularly bored and vulnerable to addiction.
The drug was first developed in 1959 for use as a painkiller for cancer patients, often injected or as a patch. In the 2010s, it increasingly turned up in pills and other forms in the US opioid epidemic, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Initially, the drug was produced in India and China and mailed to recipients across North America, says a RAND Corporation study from February.
Makeshift labs have since sprung up in Mexico to receive the precursor chemicals from Asia, mix them or press them into pills, and smuggle them into the US.
One kilo of fentanyl purchased for a few thousand dollars can yield hundreds of thousands of pills worth millions.
Organized criminals from the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have started producing fentanyl themselves. Its precursor chemicals are cheap and hard to trace, as they are often used to make such basic goods as soap, medicines and pesticides.
Drugs and paraphernalia recovered from a bust in New York in September 2016, in which officers made a record seizure of 33 kilograms of heroin and 2 kilograms of fentanyl from a drug ring encompassing New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Arizona and New Jersey
DEA officers seized a million fake pills containing fentanyl at a home in Inglewood, California, in July. The drug is so potent that users can easily take a lethal dose
Immigrants seeking asylum in the US are processed by border agents after crossing into Arizona from Mexico. Guards told DailyMail.com that cartels get drugs across the border by using migrants as decoys
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates there were 109,673 overdose deaths in the year to April — a new record. Many were due to fentanyl, pictured
The above CDC graph shows estimated (dotted line) and confirmed (black line) drug overdose deaths in the US since 2015. There has been a small downturn, which may just be fatalities returning to pre-pandemic levels
This map shows the change in overdose deaths over the 12 months to June 2022 compared to the 12 months to June 2021
Fentanyl’s size makes it easier to smuggle across the border — couriers often cross the frontier at legal checkpoints with small packages hidden in their underwear, say US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) guards.
Guards last year seized 800lbs of fentanyl each month — double the amount being seized in the 2020 fiscal year. In one incident last month, CBP officers discovered 26 pounds of methamphetamine and 10 pounds of fentanyl in the car of an 18-year-old American man.
On a recent visit to the border in El Paso, Texas, CBP officials told DailyMail.com that surges of migrants across the US-Mexico frontier were often a decoy used to distract guards while traffickers moved drugs over the border many miles away.
The cartel trafficking networks use the US interstate system to reach wholesale markets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York and other East Coast cities, at which point street-level drug dealers take over.
Fentanyl is commonly mixed with drugs like heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine, or pressed into pills that resemble other prescription opioids. On the street, it is known as everything from Apache to China Girl, and Goodfellas.
The DEA has warned that fentanyl is being sold in multicolored pills and powders — sometimes referred to as ‘rainbow fentanyl’ — marketed on social media to teens and young adults.
Users often have no clue they are taking fentanyl, and in many cases are even trying to avoid the cheaper, dangerous substitute.
The overdose rate is high because of fentanyl’s potency. DEA tests show that four in ten pills sold in the US have at least 2mg of fentanyl — the equivalent of about five grains of salt — a dose that is considered potentially lethal.
The agency warns that ‘one pill can kill’.
One such tragedy involved Lillianna Alfaro, 19, a recent high school graduate and mother of a toddler, in Appleton, Wisconsin. She thought she was taking the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in December 2020. Instead, the fentanyl pill killed her.
Lillianna Alfaro, 19, thought she was taking an antianxiety drug Xanax in December 2020. She unwittingly took a fatal dose of fentanyl
Bereaved mom Tami Garcia (left) has launched the website Alex’s Story to honor her son (right) and raise money and awareness to fight the fentanyl scourge
Notable cases of fentanyl overdose include pop legend Prince (left), who died in 2016, and rapper Mac Miller (right), who died of an overdose in 2018
On the backstreets of Los Angeles (pictured), San Francisco, New York and other big cities, the sight of down-and-outs collapsed on sidewalks, puffing fentanyl smoke and lurching from moments of slumber to bouts of violent shivering have become all too common
The same goes for Alex Garcia, 19, from Medford, Oregon, who overdosed on what is understood to be fentanyl in August. He and his friends had messaged each other about how they worried about buying anything containing the risky drug.
His mother, Tami Garcia, describes a typical teenager who mixed with the wrong crowd, began experimenting with drugs, and got caught out by a dealer selling him something much stronger than the Xanax he thought he was buying.
Garcia, 38, blames the Biden administration for lax border security and for letting drugs flow in from Tijuana up Interstate 5. She launched the website Alex’s Story to raise money and awareness to fight the fentanyl scourge.
She is not alone. The FaceBook group Lost Voices of Fentanyl has tens of thousands of members who pay tribute to those claimed by the drug.
Its members rallied in Washington, DC, in September, carrying banners with the faces of 3,500 fentanyl victims in a bid to pressure the Biden administration to boost border security and staunch the flow of narcotics.
Notable cases of fentanyl overdoses include rapper Mac Miller, who died of an overdose in 2018, and pop singer Prince, who died in 2016.
In Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other big cities, the sight of down-and-outs collapsed on sidewalks, puffing fentanyl smoke and lurching from moments of slumber to bouts of violent shivering have become all too common.
The devastation has become so bad that fentanyl flows across the US-Mexico border have become a flashpoint between Democrats and Republicans.
Republican senators Roger Marshall and Rick Scott say the Biden administration should designate Mexico’s cartels as foreign terrorist groups — as was done with Isis and Al-Qaeda — to better crack down on their activities.
Others hope science can offer an answer. Researchers at the University of Houston, in Texas, developed a vaccine that may be able to totally block the effects of fentanyl — potentially saving thousands of Americans from overdoses each year.
Dr Colin Haile, who led the research, says it could be used for people addicted to illicit drugs who run the risk of accidentally using fentanyl, or by parents urging their child to be vaccinated before going off to college to protect them in case they ‘experiment’.
Researchers developed a three-shot vaccine that leads to the formation of fentanyl antibodies in a person’s bloodstream. These antibodies can prevent the drug from reaching the brain and totally negate it. This, in turn, stops overdoses
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