In 1986, Richard Cowan, a Republican-turned-cannabis-activist, described this phenomenon as the “Iron Law of Prohibition”: “the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the drugs become.” Remarkably, Cowan predicted that potent synthetic drugs would come to dominate the illicit drug market under prohibition, increasing the risk of fatal overdoses. That’s right: the current opioid crisis was predicted three decades before it hit a boiling point.
Under prohibition, both suppliers and drug users have strong incentives to minimize the bulk of contraband in order to minimize the risk of detection, thereby encouraging more potent substances. Sure enough, that’s exactly what Dr. Wood and his team’s study found to be the effect of trying to shut down heroin, cocaine, and cannabis up to the year 2007. What happened after that date?
The United States dramatically increased its efforts to stop the importation of heroin. Between 2008 and 2015, enforcement at the border with Mexico intensified such that authorities seized 400% more heroin, a staggering scale-up. It was during this same period that OxyContin was transformed into OxyNeo to make it harder to use intravenously. In other words, there were major endeavours to reduce the supply of both licit and illicit drugs.
That’s when Cowan’s Iron Law of Prohibition kicked in. The criminal underworld found a solution to the crackdown: it started manufacturing illicit fentanyl at a fraction of the price, produced anywhere, and was 30–50 times more potent than heroin. And if that wasn’t enough, we’re now seeing carfentanyl hitting the streets. It’s the Iron Law of Prohibition on steroids.
When I came face to face with the hard evidence, it was clear: the “war on drugs” has not only failed, it’s actually made things worse. In fact, it’s one of the principal causes of the opioid crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of people across North America in recent years. In retrospect, the crisis was an entirely predictable consequence of prohibition.
“You know,” said Jordan Westfall, “we can play this game for a century. We’ve already done it, right? I think this has to literally be the death knell of how we do things currently. Like the war on drugs, drug prohibition. If there’s a signal in your society that things need to change, it better be 4000 people dying this year of an entirely preventable death. And we’re going to continue to lose people at alarming rates unless we do an entire reassessment of how we make policy in this area and how we view people who use drugs.”
–5–
WHY ARE DEALERS KILLING THEIR CUSTOMERS?
• Stir for 15 minutes at 50 to 60 degrees Celsius.
• Let cool.
• Filter off the salts.
Five minutes online is all it took for me to find a bona fide recipe for making homemade fentanyl. The underground chemist who published this notorious set of instructions (redacted above) goes by the pseudonym Siegfried. The method was first described in the 1980s—decades before we were introduced to the idea of chemists moonlighting as illegal drug manufacturers like Walter White (a.k.a. Heisenberg) in the HBO series Breaking Bad.
“I’m french speaking organic chemist so excuse my rusty english,” writes Siegfried. “The risk of overdose is really high, even with the dilution i [sic] described before, so test your stuff before selling it!” That advice reminded me of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay telling aspiring master chefs to always taste the food they plan to serve. Of course, the big difference is that on his show the consequences of making a bad batch are embarrassing, not fatal.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2017 report on fentanyl found that most fentanyl recently seized in the United States isn’t pharmaceutical but rather synthesized using Siegfried’s method, which doesn’t require advanced laboratory skills.
The Siegfried method is just one of several homegrown fentanyl recipes available online that have been verified by Dr. Brian Mayer’s team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The 2700 scientists and engineers at this massive national security lab (annual funding: US$2 billion) typically work on research related to weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, so the fact that Livermore has launched a study into illicit fentanyl shows how serious the problem has become. Following these online recipes, Dr. Mayer was able to obtain the necessary ingredients to make illicit fentanyl from commercial chemical suppliers. All it takes is someone with undergraduate-level chemistry experience to do the job, and they don’t need fancy lab equipment. Even the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl can be made relatively easily. But there’s a big hitch. While pure fentanyl is relatively cheap and easy to make, diluting it to a consistent dose that humans can safely consume requires much greater sophistication.
Given its high potency, a very small quantity of fentanyl is mixed with buffers such as salt or caffeine; then it’s made into pills or cut into other street drugs. And it’s at this stage—when fentanyl is fashioned into the final product that will hit the streets—where the real danger arises. The mixing process is often anything but scientific, and the smallest variations can lead to an overdose, or a “hot dose,” as it’s known. Police have even found kitchen blenders used to mix fentanyl. That’s hardly the precise titration used in medical environments where the drug is used as a powerful painkiller.
“Even trying to mix it, because of its high level of toxicity, is very, very difficult, if not impossible,” said Clayton Pecknold, assistant deputy minister and director of police services for BC. “You’re still running a high risk of a hot dose.”
“When we first were detecting fentanyl, I was really under the impression it was a bad product launch,” said Dr. Mark Tyndall. “That they really messed up with the dosing, and after a few months they’d sort of get that fixed up. I’m still miffed at the fact that people are selling super potent opioid analogues out there.
“The surprise of the persistence of this crisis is that people are still being exposed to these drugs when I think it’s a fixable thing, as far as quality assurance goes. Fentanyl doesn’t kill people on its own, but it’s just how much you’re taking.”
Maybe there’s a chance that illicit drug producers will get better at dosing so that fewer fatal doses occur, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. After all, pure white fentanyl powder may get mixed by ridiculously unsophisticated means before sold to end users. Plus, with the demand for potent fentanyl products, there’s an economic incentive for producers to keep products strong, even when that runs the risk of killing some people.
In fact, trafficking fentanyl is so profitable that the loss of some customers from overdose deaths has apparently little to no effect on this lucrative black market. It’s like a gold rush—the quickest profit to be earned is the name of the game, with no long-term strategy. And street-level dealers may not even know that they’re peddling fentanyl-laced products, although that’s become less and less likely as illicit fentanyl has saturated the market.
“Selling opioids is a very profitable enterprise for organized crime,” said Inspector Bill Spearn, who heads up the Vancouver Police Department’s organized crime section. “They can make a lot more money than they could, say, selling traditional drugs, like cocaine and heroin.”
“Everything is profit driven in the drug business,” said RCMP Assistant Commissioner Dwayne McDonald. “Like any business, they’re pushing the product to get the best bang for the buck.”
I heard a wide range of fentanyl profitability estimates from different sources, but they all had fentanyl generating exponential returns. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported that 99% pure illicit fentanyl can be bought from China for between US$3300 and US$5000 per kilogram, and that it can generate revenue in the United States of between US$1.28 and $1.92 million.
Investigators with the Vancouver Police Department keep track of the street price of illicit drugs by doing undercover drug buys and using other investigative tactics. They agreed to share their criminal intelligence data so that
I could see just how profitable illicit fentanyl is today compared with a traditional drug like heroin.
In Vancouver, the street price of a hit of illicit fentanyl (3.6% to 5% pure) mirrors heroin—both are $10 for a “half point,” or 0.05 grams. Indeed, drug users may think they’re purchasing heroin, but end up getting fentanyl. Where things get interesting is that traffickers can import one kilogram of illicit fentanyl (at 51% to 73% purity) for as low as $8600, whereas the same quantity of heroin would cost between $68,000 and $72,000 to import. And remember that fentanyl is many times more potent than heroin. In other words, fentanyl is irresistibly more lucrative for mid- and high-level drug traffickers than heroin.
As Inspector Spearn points out, “You can’t even compare fentanyl and heroin. That’s why we have such a problem right now. You bring in a kilo of something that is 50 times stronger than heroin for a substantially lower amount of money. It will go 50 times further. The profit is just enormous.”
RCMP Sergeant Eric Boechler estimated that, for experienced traffickers, one kilogram of illicit fentanyl can be converted into a multi-million-dollar windfall: “If properly cut for street-level distribution, [it] would be able to create 100 kilograms of counterfeit heroin. Heroin in the Vancouver area typically sells for approximately $70,000 per kilogram, making this 100 kilograms worth approximately $7 million.”
But, of course, the cost of this get-rich-quick scheme is being felt throughout North America in terms of lives lost and families suffering, as well as by taxpayers who are footing the bill for massive policing, healthcare, and social services expenditures to respond to the opioid crisis.
“There’s so much money to be made, and it sucks that a lot of people really don’t care about human life,” said Troy Balderson, downtown projects manager at Vancouver’s Lookout Society. “They only think about the bottom line, and that’s a tragedy in itself.”
* * *
——
Modern technology has made it easier for mid- and high-level fentanyl traffickers to not only profit from this deadly trade but also avoid detection. Illicit fentanyl, the dark web, and cryptocurrencies have come together in a perfect storm to give organized crime, independent drug dealers, and even individual drug users ready access to overseas illicit drug suppliers. The process offers a lower cost and a reduced risk of detection by law enforcement than does acquiring traditional drugs like heroin or cocaine.
To start with, illicit fentanyl is totally unlike other established street drugs like cocaine and heroin, which require traffickers to move large quantities that are harder to transport surreptitiously. In pure powder form, illicit fentanyl is so potent that even extremely small quantities can turn a massive profit, and they’re far less likely to be found by border inspectors. Letters with illicit fentanyl weighing just 10 grams (one-third the weight of a typical greeting card) have been seized at the border. Once they’ve been delivered, an extremely small quantity of pure fentanyl powder is then mixed, or cut, with other drugs or legal substances like salt and caffeine to expand its volume exponentially.
Another major difference with established street drugs like cocaine and heroin is that these are cultivated in specific locations (such as Colombia and Afghanistan, respectively), whereas fentanyl is synthetic and so can be produced anywhere. Cocaine and heroin production and distribution are also controlled by extremely violent, hardened criminals. As a warning to others, Mexican drug cartels have allegedly used chainsaws and meat cleavers to behead people who have crossed them.
“You don’t have to have that intricate network of connections. It’s for sale online,” said Victoria Police Staff Sergeant Conor King. “Somebody who is just savvy, wandering through the dark web and savvy with using bitcoin or whatever payment they want to use, can order direct. They don’t need to have connections with the Mexican drug cartels or Afghan overlords or whatever. They can just order it online. So it’s a simple process. You hear of these people who just order it and UPS delivers it to their door.”
The dark web is like a secret part of the Internet that’s accessible using special software designed to keep users anonymous and undetectable. It’s a whole online world with which most of us are probably unfamiliar. Studies have found that drug trafficking over the dark web is on the rise, although there are also illicit transactions that occur through websites not on the dark web.
How do you pay for goods purchased on the dark web? That’s where cryptocurrencies like bitcoin come in. These digital currencies rely on encryption technology to secure and verify transactions. They’re virtual mediums of exchange that aren’t controlled by any government or central bank and that can later be exchanged for hard cash. And like all technological innovations, the dark web and cryptocurrencies can be used for good or ill.
“Going on the Internet, I was very easily able to find places that would source fentanyl for me and ship it to whatever mailbox and name I wanted,” said Abbotsford, BC Deputy Chief Mike Serr, who chairs the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Drug Advisory Committee. “I know the RCMP have been doing a significant amount of work on the dark web and places like that to try to source fentanyl.”
“We’ve seen the dark web being used to purchase fentanyl, which means anyone with an Internet connection can generally go online and order it,” confirmed David Lothian, chief of the Intelligence Section at the Canada Border Services Agency in BC. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, some illicit fentanyl manufacturers in China were once offering customers free replacements if their first order was seized by customs agents. Try getting that kind of customer service from the cartel.
The combination of small quantities of pure illicit fentanyl being ordered on the dark web, paid for using cryptocurrencies, and then shipped by mail or courier delivery is a disruptive game changer for transnational drug trafficking. The model also skirts anti–money laundering and banking regulations designed to combat traditional drug trafficking.
In Canada, all transactions over $10,000 made through a traditional bank get automatically reported to FINTRAC (the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada), which has a mandate to detect, prevent, and deter money laundering. But if the quantities of illicit fentanyl being seized are between 10 and 20 grams, then the funds transferred wouldn’t automatically be flagged to the authorities. Of course, with cryptocurrencies, transactions of any amount aren’t caught. That’s a concern for Lothian. “The issue of cryptocurrency is outside our mandate, but it seems that it’s still largely unregulated,” he told me. “There are challenges in determining how cryptocurrency is defined—whether or not it’s a commodity, a currency, or a negotiable instrument. But regulations around that may help because it currently provides the ability for an individual to maintain anonymity through transferring funds and could be used to purchase potential illicit materials like opioids and fentanyl.”
But Staff Sergeant King notes that it’s not always easy to order illicit drugs online. There are scams out there. Websites offer illicit drugs, then demand payment upfront. They’ll happily take your digital currency, but then ship nothing. “I think the problem these guys face is that finding the actual bona fide dealer online, which can deliver, after you send the bitcoin, is harder than it looks,” said King. “The Better Business Bureau is not going to be assisting them.”
Law enforcement and border officials are scrambling to catch up to the new world they find themselves responsible for policing. And they have a lot of catching up to do. Can we just stop illicit fentanyl from coming into the country, or, as some politicians have argued, can we stop it at its source?
–6–
CAN WE STOP FENTANYL AT ITS SOURCE?
It was March 2013. Undercover officers with the Victoria Police Department didn’t know it yet, but the opioid crisis was about to hit British Columbia’s coastal city like a tsunami. “We’d known that there was something going on,” said Staff Sergeant Conor King. “We
wanted to start getting a better handle on it—what drugs were out there.”
King’s team went undercover to do a drug buy from a local dealer. They didn’t know it at the time, but data from the BC Coroners Service would later show that this was almost exactly when illicit drug overdose deaths began to skyrocket in the province.
They had the drugs tested, and there it was: fentanyl.
King immediately contacted the RCMP’s CLEAR team (Clandestine Laboratory Enforcement and Response). They were already zeroing in on the source of illicit fentanyl that had started cropping up elsewhere in the country.
“The fentanyl was coming in from China,” said King.
Police officers, criminal intelligence analysts, and medical experts all kept telling me that the vast majority of illicit fentanyl in Canada was manufactured in China. (There’s a good reason why white-powder heroin laced with fentanyl is called “China White.”) The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency was the most commonly cited source for this information; both the RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department officially cite the DEA. Some police officers and a Crown prosecutor were able to point to investigations and prosecutions they’d run that confirmed the China connection. But a few people I spoke to questioned the China connection, saying it was just hearsay. So I wanted to get direct evidence on the source of the illicit fentanyl that was killing so many thousands of people. That meant getting in touch with the people who protect our borders.
Overdose Page 6
