The ingredients to make millions of dollars worth of deadly fentanyl can be easily and legally purchased online for just a few thousand dollars — and regulators are almost powerless to stop it, a shocking new investigation found.
Just $3,600 was needed to purchase enough ingredients to produce about $3 million in street value of the high-addictive opioid that kills thousands of Americans each year, according to a Reuters investigation.
By using little more than a smartphone, an internet connection, and access to digital currency like BitCoin, a reporter was able to purchase the 14 chemicals that can be used to produce fentanyl online.
The ingredients were ordered from a seller in China and shipped to Mexico, before reaching their final destination in the US.
Once the chemicals are acquired, fentanyl is also extremely easy to make, the investigation uncovered — with no specialized lab equipment required beyond what can be purchased on Amazon, let alone laboratory experience.
“It’s like making chicken soup,” said one Mexican fentanyl cook in the cartel stronghold state of Sinaloa, who dropped out of school at 12 and quickly picked up the trade.
“It’s mega-easy making that drug,” he told Reuters.
The outlet did not actually create fentanyl once all the ingredients were acquired and never intended to — a technicality that made purchasing the fatal cocktail perfectly legal.
Most US laws only target buyers if there is evidence they intend to create or sell illegal narcotics.
Further complicating US regulators’ efforts to stem the flow of fentanyl into the country is the nature of the ingredients themselves, which are known as “precursors” and are commonly used in perfectly legal and common products like perfumes and fragrances, textiles, rubber, dyes, insecticides, and innocuous commonplace pharmaceuticals.
“It’s not easy,” said Todd Robinson, the US State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, explaining how the government tries to thread the needle between curbing the drug trade and not suffocating above-board commerce.
“We continue to want to walk that fine line,” he said.
Fentanyl first emerged in the 1960s as a pain medication and it is still used legally in hospitals across the world. It creates a euphoric high similar to strong opioids but requires far lower quantities to do so.
By the 1970s, the mega-addictive drug had made its way onto the streets in laced doses of heroin known as “China White.”
Fentanyl didn’t really explode until the 2010s, however, when prescription painkillers pushed on the public by opioid producers like Purdue Pharma sparked a crippling epidemic across the country, eventually prompting the US to crack down on prescriptions.
Trying to wean off the opioid can cause intense side effects, such as severe insomnia, muscle aches, nausea, fever, sweating, vomiting and diarrhea.
Today the drug is the leading killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), with nearly 75,000 dying from synthetic opioid overdoses in 2023 — most of which were from fentanyl.
Since 2015, overdose death rates in the US have doubled, according to Reuters.
For years China supplied most of the fentanyl that crossed the sea to poison Americans, but after a Beijing crackdown in 2019, the Mexican cartels stepped in to fill the void.
Easing that transition were recipes for fentanyl widely available online known as the “Gupta method,” which was developed by an Indian scientist as a quick method for creating strong drugs for battlefield injuries.
The Gupta method requires only three simple steps and a variation of four common ingredients.
Though China has curbed its fentanyl exports, many of the ingredients cartels are using to create the drug are still coming from the country — and are flagrantly sold either through the dark web or on regular browsers.
Most of the chemicals purchased by Reuters came from dealers in China, who insisted on communicating only through encrypted platforms like WhatsApp or Telegram, but were perfectly candid about what they were dealing once contact was made.
One such supplier was a website called “Breaking Bad” and was run by an administrator called “Heisenberg” — an outright reference to the television show about a high school chemistry teacher-turned methamphetamine-making drug lord.
Once orders were placed, the chemicals were either shipped in mislabeled boxes, stashed inside products like cat food, or sent outright to their destinations — many of which were processed and passed by US Customs officials often left powerless to do anything but wave the legal goods through.
“We can’t seize our way out of the fentanyl threat,” one senior Customs official told Reuters, explaining how regulations on what can and can’t be bought and shipped to the US need to be strengthened.
“We have to be working collaboratively across the US government and with our foreign partners,” she said.
At least three of the Chinese businesses Reuters purchased from were among a dozen indicted by the US for selling fentanyl supplies since 2023 — but a seller from one of them outright brushed aside those charges.
“We are a powerful company,” a seller from Amarvel Biotech told Reuters.
“This incident has no impact on us.”
With Post wires