Cartel members arrived at the homeless camp with their latest formulation of fentanyl in syringes. The offer was simple, according to two men who lived there in northwestern Mexico: up to $30 for anyone willing to inject themselves with the formula.
The Times A weekly selection of stories in Spanish that you won’t find anywhere else, with ñs and accents. Get it sent to your inbox.
One of the men, Pedro López Camacho, said he volunteered repeatedly, sometimes being visited by cartel members every day. They watched the drug take effect, López Camacho said, taking photos and recording his reaction. He survived, but he said he saw many others who didn’t.
López Camacho said of the drugs he and others were given that when it’s very strong, it knocks people out or kills them.
This is how far the Mexican cartels have gone to dominate the fentanyl business.
Global efforts to crack down on the synthetic opioid have made it harder for these criminal groups to obtain the chemical compounds they need to produce the drug. The original source, China, has restricted exports of the necessary raw materials, leading the cartels to come up with new — and extremely risky — methods of maintaining fentanyl production and potency.
ImageA man in a white shirt looks out over a patio in a city at night.
A high-level member of the Sinaloa Cartel looked out over the city of Culiacan.
The experimentation, cartel members say, involves combining the drug with a wider range of additives, including animal sedatives and other dangerous anesthetics. To test their results, criminals who make fentanyl for the cartels, often called cooks, say they inject their experimental mixtures into humans as well as rabbits and chickens.
If the rabbits survive more than 90 seconds, the drug is considered too weak to be sold to American consumers, according to six cooks and two U.S. Embassy officials who monitor cartel activity.
U.S. officials said that when Mexican law enforcement has raided fentanyl labs, they have sometimes found the facilities littered with dead animals used for testing.
“They experiment Dr. Death style,” said Renato Sales, a former Mexican National Security commissioner. “It’s to see the potency of the substance. To see, ‘you die with this,’ ‘you don’t with this,’ so we can grade it.”
The chefs’ accounts match Mexican government data showing an increase in consumption of fentanyl mixed with xylazine and other substances, especially in cities near the U.S. border.
“We are seeing that the illicit market is getting much more profit from its substances by cutting them with different mechanisms, such as xylazine,” said Alexiz Bojorge Estrada, deputy director of a mental health and addictions commission.
“You enhance it and therefore you need less product,” said Bojorge, referring to fentanyl, “and so you get more profit from it.”
American drug-fighting researchers have also observed an increase in what one of them called a “stranger and more chaotic” fentanyl. After analyzing hundreds of samples in the United States, they discovered an increase in the variety of chemical compounds in fentanyl circulating on the streets.
“It’s the Wild West of experimentation,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine who helped coordinate the analysis of more than 580 samples of drugs sold as fentanyl in Washington state this year.
He called it “absolute chaos.”
The experiments
The synthetic opioids that end up on American streets typically begin in cartel labs, where precision isn’t always a priority, cooks say. They mix containers of chemicals in rudimentary kitchens and expose themselves to toxic substances that cause some cooks to hallucinate, pass out, lose consciousness and even die.
The cartels actively recruit college chemistry students to work as cooks. One student working for the cartel revealed that to test their formulas, the group would bring in homeless drug addicts and inject them with the synthetic opioid. No one has ever died, the student said, but there have been defective batches.
“There have been some who have convulsed, foamed at the mouth,” the student said.
She added that cooks’ mistakes were punished severely: Gunmen would lock offenders in rooms with rats and snakes, and leave them there for long periods without food or water.
Cooks and high-level operatives described the Sinaloa Cartel as a decentralized organization, a collection of so many disparate cells that no leader or faction had full control of the group’s fentanyl production.
Some cooks said they wanted to create a standardized product that wouldn’t kill users. Others said they didn’t see the lethality of their product as a problem, but rather as a marketing ploy.
In a U.S. federal indictment against the sons of notorious drug lord Joaquin Loera Guzman (known as El Chapo), who ran a powerful faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, prosecutors said the group shipped fentanyl to the United States even after an addicted person died while trying it in Mexico.
Rather than scaring people, cartel members, drug users and experts say many American consumers rush to buy a particularly deadly batch because they know it will have a powerful effect.
“One dies, but ten more addicts are born,” said a high-ranking cartel operative. “There is no concern for them.”
The boss knew something was wrong when the chickens stopped collapsing. He said he had been in the drug business since he was 12, when he started as an apprentice at a facility that processed heroin.
The soft-spoken 22-year-old said he learned how to make illicit drugs by studying the older, more experienced men he worked with. Eventually, he set up his own business with a friend.
The boss said his business grew so quickly that he soon ran three fentanyl labs. The drug has made him millions, he said.
Every time he goes to one of his labs, he said he brings four or five rabbits from the local pet store. If the fentanyl his people make is potent enough, he has to inject and kill only one to make sure it’s fit for sale.
Two employees at pet stores in Sinaloa, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from cartel members, confirmed that cheaper rabbits are known to be bought for drug testing.
Other animals used for the boss’s tests are chickens from a nearby ranch. Many fentanyl cooks test their product on chickens, according to two U.S. embassy officials.
Until recently, the boss said that every time he injected fentanyl into the chickens, they died, fell over or staggered around as if drunk. All the locals knew not to eat the chickens or the eggs from the ranch.
But lately the animals had no strong reaction to the drug, although his process had not changed.
His employees worked the same hours in the same modest laboratory in the mountains, starting at 5 a.m. and sleeping there for days on end. They worked with the same equipment: laboratory shakers, trays, huge containers and a blender to mix the final product.
The boss said he eventually concluded that a “very discounted” supply of the chemical ingredients from China was to blame. The result was a product to be thrown away.
“It comes very, very discounted,” he said.
To solve the problem, the boss first tried combining fentanyl with ketamine, a short-acting anesthetic, but said users didn’t like the bitter taste that came from smoking the mixture. He said adding procaine, a local anesthetic often used to numb small areas of the body during dental procedures, worked much better.
Asked if he felt guilty about producing a drug that causes mass deaths, the boss said he was just giving his customers what they wanted.
“If there weren’t all these people taking drugs, you wouldn’t sell,” he said. “It’s their fault, really. You just take advantage of the situation.”
The Cook
One cook we spoke to said he got into the fentanyl business a few years ago to pay off mounting debts. At first, a former shop owner regularly fell ill from exposure to the fumes. He said the armed cartel members in charge had no patience for him.
“You come in and start working, and you start to feel like throwing up and you go outside for a while to rest,” the cook said, but all too soon “and the boss himself tells you, ‘Go to work.’”
He was once shot by a boss just because he didn’t answer a question quickly enough, he said, lifting his shirt to reveal a scar on his stomach.
He constantly experiments with ways to make fentanyl stronger, tweaking his formula and testing it on his lab assistants, many of whom have become addicted in the process, he said. If the product proves strong, he passes it on to his supervisors to test.
The cook said he knows all this improvisation results in an unpredictable product. He said every batch he makes is different, meaning customers who buy exactly the same fentanyl pills can get very different doses from week to week.
He has never fully disclosed his job to his family, saying only that he goes to work and comes back weeks later with a pile of money. He believes the money and the fear evident in his expression deter any questions.
“There are no pensions there,” the cook said, adding that the cartel would probably kill him if he tried to stop. “There is just work or death.”
Source: nytimes
