JS: Fentanyl is one of the most dangerous drugs in the world,
contributing to tens of thousands of deaths every year.
But very little is known about who actually makes this drug
and who's really profiting from it.
In this episode, we're uncovering the secrets of the fentanyl trade.
I’m JS Rafaeli.
I’ve spent years writing about drugs,
why people take them,
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
We make a lot of films at VICE about drugs,
but in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper.
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds
about their research into
the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
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Ben Westhoff is an investigative journalist
and leading expert on the emerging synthetic drugs market.
He went undercover,
infiltrating the labs in China where this drug is being produced
on an industrial scale.
Ben, welcome to
Thanks for having me.
So, for anyone who doesn’t know,
what is fentanyl, and how is it different than heroin?
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid
that basically acts on the same receptors in the brain
as heroin, morphine, opium, all that.
The thing is, it’s about 50 times stronger than heroin,
and only two milligrams of fentanyl
is enough to potentially make someone overdose.
And how did you personally
end up investigating this drug in particular?
I had a friend who died from fentanyl patches.
He was misusing them.
In 2010, he overdosed and died.
Later, I was doing reporting on the rave scene,
doing a story about why so many people were dying at raves.
This was very strange
because all the deaths were attributed to ecstasy.
But I had been in the rave scene myself
and never known ecstasy to be a particularly dangerous drug.
So I went down the rabbit hole
and learned that there was no pure MDMA
really on the scene at all anymore,
and all of the so-called ecstasy
was being adulterated with these new synthetic chemicals,
and they’re called NPS, novel psychoactive substances.
They were all made in a lab, and they were all made in China,
and almost no one knew anything about them.
So, off I went
and found that fentanyl was the most deadly among them all.
So we hear a lot about fentanyl in the news right now,
but there’s actually kind of a more interesting
and complex backstory to this drug
than most people are aware of, right?
Fentanyl was invented in 1959 by a Belgian chemist,
and he was looking for an alternative to morphine
for hospital procedures like open heart surgery.
And the benefit of fentanyl is that it came on much faster
and also it went away faster.
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The problem is, though,
the same thing that makes fentanyl a great drug for hospital use
makes it a bad drug for illicit use.
And that’s because with heroin if you take a dose,
you won't need another one for most of the day.
But fentanyl fades off so quickly
that users have to re-up in two or three hours.
So the key moment in fentanyl’s emergence
is the North American opioid crisis.
Can we look at how that kind of
drove the explosion of synthetic opioids?
The only two major countries
that have ever had a fentanyl problem
are the US and Canada.
What US and Canada have in common
is that we had this opioid overprescription crisis,
and so we’ve all heard about the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma,
overprescribing opioids like OxyContin.
And that set the table
for millions of new opioid users.
When their prescriptions ran out,
they found themselves addicted to opioids,
and so they filled this craving the only way they could,
which was by buying heroin on the street.
And eventually,
there was basically not enough heroin to meet this demand,
and so fentanyl basically rushed in to fill this void.
And before long,
there was a point where you couldn’t find any heroin
that wasn’t cut with fentanyl.
And it was these fake pharmaceutical pills
that led to the death of musicians like Prince, right?
Yeah, Prince and Tom Petty
both took what they thought were actual pharmaceutical pills
but were actually cut with fentanyl.
And that just goes to show that
even people with a lot of money
can’t get the real thing anymore,
that fentanyl has just utterly infiltrated the drug supply.
So who's actually making fentanyl?
The precursor chemicals are made in China.
So these are the most important chemical ingredients
to make fentanyl.
And these chemicals are shipped on to Mexico,
and the cartels finish the fentanyl to make the final product
and then send it across the border.
There are plenty of black market drug manufacturers in China
who make every sort of illegal drug under the sun,
but they’re really outnumbered by
these so-called gray market companies.
And these gray market companies
specialize in chemicals that are legal in China
but illegal in the US.
So that’s been the focus of my research,
and that’s kind of the main types of companies
that are driving this crisis.
But for quite a while, like, from around 2010 onwards,
these were completely legitimate companies,
and you could just order fentanyl from China.
Yeah, before 2019, you could just go on the internet,
type “buy fentanyl in China,”
and a whole bunch of companies would come up.
You could order it right to your door.
You didn't even need to go on the dark web.
It was just all really out there in the open.
So in 2019,
China finally blanket banned all fentanyl analogs.
The only problem is that there’s a cat-and-mouse game
between the chemists and the government
because every time they crack down on a new fentanyl analog,
the chemists will just tweak the molecular formula
and make something else.
And so we’re getting an influx of all these novel new opioids
in the US now.
And you've actually been out to China
and seen these fentanyl and precursor labs.
What was that like?
So I basically just started by googling “buy fentanyl in China,”
and the names of all these companies popped up,
and their sales,
people’s contact information was right there.
And so I made a fake name, fake avatar,
and I just started reaching out to these companies
and asking all sorts of information, posing as a customer.
Eventually, I said,
“Well, if I were to come out to China,
would you show me your facilities?”
and some of them said, “Yes.”
And so I ended up seeing a fentanyl lab in Shanghai
and went to this giant fentanyl precursors company in Wuhan.
So I’m assuming this isn’t
some kind of backwoods
I met up with this chemist.
We drove way out to the suburbs of Shanghai.
I was really freaking out.
The GPS on my phone didn’t work.
But when we got there, I was surprised.
It was basically just like a suburban office park.
And he used a key fob
to get in with the mechanical arm to the parking lot.
There was a big fountain.
There weren’t guys with AK-47s guarding the door.
It was about five different rooms, fairly small labs,
not very many employees,
very kind of overpowering chemical smell
when I walked in the door.
But the amount of drugs they were making
was really staggering.
They focused on these fentanyl analogs
and also K2 and spice, known as synthetic cannabinoids.
They had packaged these drugs up into one-kilo baggies,
and there were huge barrels full of these baggies
ready to be shipped all over the world.
It really spoke to
the demand worldwide for these drugs
because, remember, only two milligrams of fentanyl
is enough to make someone potentially overdose.
Strangely, when it comes to the fentanyl precursors,
it actually seems like there’s one giant company
that dominates the entire market.
I was doing research into
which companies were making these fentanyl precursors,
and there were dozens and dozens of examples
that came up in my searches.
But as I investigated each one,
I realized that these weren’t individual companies.
These were actually just shell companies
of this larger conglomerate,
and the name of it was Yuancheng,
and their headquarters were in Wuhan.
I determined that they were selling more fentanyl precursors
than any other company in the world.
And it turns out that
they had a sales force of over 700 people working for them.
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When I visited this company,
this was 2018, so it was before COVID.
Yuancheng was based out of this old hotel
in this industrial section of Wuhan.
It’s basically a city known for really prestigious universities,
and also it’s home to
the world’s biggest chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
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I was shocked to see the sales floor,
where there were all, like, cubicles.
It looked just like a regular Western office.
They were basically
selling the ingredients for this most dangerous drug
like it was anything else.
And how is law enforcement struggling to deal with this?
Like, how are they linking these deaths in America
to factories in China?
When it became clear that China was exporting
these new synthetic drugs like fentanyl
that was causing so much death in America,
the American government tried to put pressure on China, you know,
in a number of different ways.
Trump tried to tie the trade war.
He raised tariffs and things like that.
But the geopolitical relationship got really rocky after COVID
because Trump was basically blaming China for it,
and so China announced
they were going to completely cut off relations
when it comes to enforcing narcotics laws in China.
Because there have been some pretty clear instances
where America has tried to extradite some of these people.
and the Chinese authorities have refused to hand them over.
China has no extradition treaty with the US
and really doesn’t want to be told what to do.
At the same time,
they don’t want to be seen as the drug pushers of the world.
And so there has been
some collaboration with these big drug kingpins
who are exporting fentanyl and fentanyl products to the US.
But someone like Ye Chuan Fa from the Yuancheng corporation,
who I met with,
the US indicted him
and offered a $5 million bounty
for information leading to his capture.
If he came to the US, for example,
he could be arrested getting off the plane.
But since he knows about this indictment,
it’s most likely he’s just going to stay put.
And perhaps the crucial question in all of this
is how have the Chinese government
actively incentivized the growth of the fentanyl industry?
One of my key findings
was that the Chinese government was actively supporting it
through the tax structure.
They actually provide value-added tax rebates.
So, for example, when companies make fentanyl,
they can write off all of their production costs
and materials costs.
And I don’t think this was
a conspiracy by the Chinese government
to try to poison America,
but it was just for the financial incentives
to help the chemical industry.
The CEOs of these companies believe, you know,
“As long as it’s legal, my conscience is clear.”
And politicians at the top level who say,
“We don’t want to be known as the drug pusher of the world.”
“We shouldn’t allow these chemicals.”
But then you have local provincial officials
who see these companies bringing employment to the region
and are bringing tax dollars to the region,
and they have a vested interest in kind of looking the other way.
OK, so can we clear up some myth from reality
around the idea that fentanyl is being deliberately
cut into other drugs like cocaine and weed?
It’s a tough time to be a young person right now
because basically, if you’re experimenting with drugs,
any pill, any powder that’s acquired on the black market
can be cut with fentanyl
and often is.
You know, it seems weird,
like, why would someone cut cocaine, which is an upper,
with fentanyl, which is a downer?
But I think the reason is that fentanyl is so much cheaper.
And, like, American drug consumers
don’t know the difference for the most part
because we’ve always had terrible cocaine in this country.
And what’s sold as cocaine
has only had a tiny portion of actual cocaine in it anyway,
and if it makes people feel high in any sort of way,
the distributors think they can get away with it.
And are we seeing even more dangerous developments now?
I’m thinking specifically in terms of, like, the benzo dope
that’s creeping into the American drug supply.
When China blanket banned all the fentanyl analogs in 2019,
the good news was that we really did see a drop in the US.
The problem was that all of these chemists in China
just shifted to making different drugs.
I believe benzos actually represent the next big drug crisis in the US.
The problem is that
benzos by themselves don’t really kill people,
but they’re depressants.
And so when they’re combined with other depressants
like alcohol or opioids,
then they can kill in really high numbers.
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On the street,
you’re now seeing dealers that are selling this benzo dope,
and it’s basically fentanyl that’s cut with benzos,
or it’s benzos that’s cut with fentanyl.
And these drugs are produced so cheaply in China that ...
basically, whatever is the cheapest thing on offer this week
is what’s going to start showing up in the drug supply.