A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.
Sam Quinones is the author of Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic and The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. He writes the Dreamland Newsletter at samquinones.substack.com.
In the spring of 2006, a Mexican man walked into the San Diego offices of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He said he had fled a chemical laboratory in the industrial town of Toluca, an hour outside Mexico City.
There, he said, a man he called El Cerebro (The Brain) ran a lab funded by elements of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He was manufacturing a substance that he called heroina sintetica – synthetic heroin. The Sinaloans were smuggling it to Chicago and Detroit. This substance was potent – so potent, he said, that it was causing deaths in those cities by the dozens.
A duty agent took his report. Sure enough, in Chicago authorities were on edge because overdose deaths had been skyrocketing for several months. Most of those dying were heroin addicts, yet none were testing positive posthumously for heroin. Deaths had now spread to St. Louis, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Camden, N.J.
The problem seemed to get worse when Chicago authorities announced that users should beware of a new powerful form of heroin that was on the streets and killing people, particularly around housing projects in the city’s south side. Addicts flocked to find the drug, taking the announcement not as a warning, but as an advertisement. Deaths leaped commensurately.
A young Chicago DEA agent, Ryan Rapaszky, flew to San Diego to debrief the informant. The lab, the informant told him, was called Distribuidora Talios. It posed as a legitimate chemical distributor, using high-quality equipment, but was making fentanyl.
Mr. Rapaszky had never heard of fentanyl, nor had anyone in his office. His computer didn’t even auto-correct for the word.
Out in Washington, meanwhile, a Canadian professor of psychobiology named Bertha Madras was on leave from Harvard that spring to start a new job as deputy chief of the Drug Czar’s office: the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
On her first day at work, Dr. Madras arrived at 7:30 a.m., as would become her habit for the two years she spent in the job. At 9 a.m., the day’s batch of newspaper articles came in, detailing drug stories and major arrests for cocaine, or methamphetamine, or marijuana, from around the country.
She was surprised to read news reports of deaths due to fentanyl. Her career has been devoted to studying the effects of different classes of drugs on the brain. She certainly knew of fentanyl and its legitimate medical use for decades as a surgical anesthetic. But this was the first she’d heard of it sold and killing people on the street.
The next day, there were more stories, and more the days after that. Three more deaths in Philadelphia, five in Chicago. Two in Detroit, another in Camden. People dying of illicit street fentanyl.
She began calling county medical examiners. Some tested corpses for fentanyl; others did not – nor did they have the budget or the knowledge in how to do so. More deaths from fentanyl were likely slipping through unnoticed.
Many agencies in affected cities were working on the problem, but in isolation, unaware how these deaths connected them. A public-health worker in Philadelphia watching these deaths spread didn’t know of similar cases that a medical examiner in Chicago was autopsying. Dr. Madras realized that, at her desk in Washington, she was one of the few to see what was happening across several regions and how it was connected.
By the end of that first week in her new job, Dr. Madras was already on high alert.
“What is going on?” she thought to herself.
She found out soon enough.
On May 21, 2006, Mexican authorities raided Distribuidora Talios in Toluca. El Cerebro happened to be at the lab that Sunday, feeding the dog on site.
His name was Ricardo Valdez Torres – a Mexican citizen who had grown up in the San Diego area.
Mr. Rapaszky and Eduardo Chávez, a DEA agent based in Mexico, debriefed the chemist in a Mexico City prison. He bore no signs of a career criminal. He was well-coifed, polite, used reading glasses, wore a Members Only jacket and spoke better English than Spanish.
As an adult in San Diego, he told the agents, he had learned a rudimentary way to make fentanyl. After being arrested for manufacturing fentanyl and sent to U.S. federal prison, he learned to make it even better. He was deported to Hermosillo, Sonora, in 2004, where he was contacted by people associated with the Sinaloan drug world.
They would fund a lab just for him, he said, and wanted him to make ephedrine, a chemical used in one method for making methamphetamine. He decided to make fentanyl, assuming they would thank him later.
“He wanted the challenge of fentanyl,” said Mr. Chávez, who, along with Mexican authorities, busted the Talios lab. “He even talked about how he started with one particular method of making fentanyl, and it wasn’t efficient enough, so he switched to another.”
Sinaloan traffickers began selling test samples of Talios fentanyl in Chicago and Detroit in fall of 2005. The deaths that followed created demand for the substance among street addicts. However, it was also a sign to the lab’s investors that the drug was as potent, thus as profitable, as Mr. Valdez Torres claimed.
Distribuidora Talios didn’t operate long – only nine or 10 months. But it profoundly changed the North American drug world, probably forever.
The lab marked the first time traffickers in Sinaloa, the centre of Mexico’s sophisticated illegal drug world, had heard of fentanyl – a heroin substitute, but synthetic, made only with chemicals, and vastly more potent.
Methamphetamine had already taught Mexican traffickers the benefits of synthetic drugs over plant-based drugs: no need for sunlight, irrigation, harvesting, and, especially, no seasons. Synthetics could be made year-round with the proper ingredients.
Members of the Sinaloa drug cartel prepare capsules with methamphetamine at a safe house in Culiacan, Mexico in 2022. Before fentanyl, methamphetamine had taught Mexican traffickers the benefits of synthetic drugs over plant-based drugs.ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI/Reuters
The Toluca lab completed their evolution from ranchers and farmers to, in effect, global chemical traders. “They realize they don’t have to grow [opium] poppies,” Mr. Rapaszky told me. “They now have a guy in a lab and they can use their distribution networks to smuggle in samples first, and then kilograms, of his fentanyl. [Before that] the idea of making fentanyl just wasn’t on their radar.”
Crucially, this realization came amid North America’s opioid epidemic. Massive supplies of legitimate pharmaceutical narcotic painkillers, promoted by drug companies and prescribed by doctors, were creating a new population of opioid-addicted consumers in the United States and Canada.
Discovering fentanyl meant Mexican traffickers could exploit that gold mine with the kind of sheer supply that was never possible with heroin.
In the years that followed, furthermore, Mexican corruption combined with the impunity provided by the illegal flow of assault weapons purchased in the United States to ensure traffickers’ all-but unlimited access to precursors, mainly from China, through Mexican shipping ports.
A Sinaloa cartel cook massages blue dye into a bucket of fentanyl powder in Culiacan, December, 2024. For drug traffickers in Mexico, discovering fentanyl meant they could exploit North America’s opioid epidemic with the kind of supply that was never possible with heroin.MERIDITH KOHUT/The New York Times News Service
Fentanyl went from a niche drug, once the purview of occasional underground chemists, into the game changer, and the focus of international controversy, that it has become.
All that began with Distribuidora Talios in Toluca, Mexico, and the self-taught, underground chemist named Ricardo Valdez Torres.
In July, 2006, Bertha Madras organized a conference, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, on the new fentanyl crisis. It was attended by prosecutors, federal agents, medical examiners, addiction researchers and recovery advocates. Open to the public and held amid the rising body count, it marked the first agglomeration of North American professionals brought together solely to discuss illicit street fentanyl.
It’s also believed to be among the first public settings where the widespread use of naloxone was suggested. Naloxone (brand name Narcan) is the antidote to opioid overdose, bringing people out of unconsciousness.
During years when the supply of street opioids was relatively weak, naloxone had been found only on ambulances and in hospital emergency rooms and rarely had to be used.
Fentanyl changed that, too. People overdosed to it in huge numbers, forcing the expansion of naloxone supplies.
Rosalind Pichardo, founder of Operation Save Our City (Philadelphia) demonstrates how to administer Naloxone nasal spray to reverse an opioid overdose at a public education session in Washington, DC, in 2023.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Naloxone revives people in opioid overdose in miraculous fashion. (I carry doses of it in my backpack, toiletries bag, and car.) However, it does not address the underlying addiction. Users, once revived, are often using again within hours, risking death each time. It’s now common, in the age of fentanyl, for those who die to have several naloxone revivals to their names by the time they pass. Those who are revived, but remain using on the street, are often impaired due to the repeated deprivation of oxygen to their brains caused by an opioid overdose.
Fentanyl revealed furthermore an Achilles’ heel in the U.S. public health system that relied for early warnings and crucial data on poorly funded county death investigations. This was especially true in poorer small and rural counties, where the epidemic hit first and hardest.
At the 2006 fentanyl conference in Philadelphia, several coroners explained the budget constraints that kept them from testing for fentanyl. Autopsy physicians didn’t know what to look for. Offices had paltry budgets and couldn’t afford the numerous tests of corpses’ blood and bodily fluids. As high as the fentanyl death toll was, they were sure that many cases were going uncounted.
The official toll of fentanyl-overdose deaths attributable to fentanyl from Distribuidora Talios reached more than a thousand people in less than a year. After its closure, deaths dwindled to near zero. “The fentanyl epidemic of 2006,” Dr. Madras said, “is the best paradigm we have for why supply reduction can have a massive impact.”
Yet illicit fentanyl’s street profitability made her uneasy. “I felt it’s not going to go away forever,” she said. “Someone else will latch onto it.”
In fact, production stalled for a few years after the Sinaloans lost access to El Cerebro, who was sentenced to prison in Mexico.
Yet fentanyl began gradually creeping into the North-American drug stream. Chinese chemical companies advertising on the internet began selling and sending through the mail small quantities to drug dealers in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia – where the opioid epidemic had hit first and worst.
Soon, though, knowledge of how to make fentanyl spread through the Mexican drug world. Fentanyl wasn’t hard to make if you had the right ingredients – and they did, from Chinese chemical companies bringing in supplies through ports in Mexico. Their fentanyl smuggled across the border far outstripped anything Chinese companies could ship through the mail.
With precursor chemicals coming in from China and knowledge about the drug spreading among the cartels, the flow of fentanyl smuggled through Mexico's borders began surging in 2017, covering North America by 2020.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
By 2017, fentanyl was spreading east and west, and had effectively covered North America by 2020 as the pandemic hit.
These relentless supplies are what made fentanyl such a devastating street drug. For they created demand, then took users’ tolerances to towering levels that made kicking the drug, even in the face of almost-certain death, supremely difficult.
At one point, Mr. Valdez Torres told the DEA agents, his lab investors discussed the possibility of putting fentanyl in counterfeit pharmaceutical pills to appeal to those addicted to prescription opioids in the United States. He said he nixed the idea. But that happened years later, as fentanyl production ballooned in Mexico.
The phony pills are now smuggled from Mexico into the United States by the tens of millions and have addicted, and killed, many people who believed they were buying legitimate pharmaceutical pills.
Fentanyl pills made to look similar to OxyContin pills.
Street dealers, meanwhile, learned they could spike plentiful fentanyl into other drugs. This happened first with heroin, then with Colombian cocaine, and finally with the methamphetamine that Mexican traffickers are also producing in massive amounts.
It wasn’t just the volume of fentanyl heading north that altered the landscape – it was the nature of the drug itself. It had long been a useful surgical anesthetic because it took patients into and out of anesthesia very quickly. That made it safer than morphine, which heavily doped a patient for hours.
On the street, however, fentanyl’s fast-acting nature made it a bonanza for dealers. A customer who bought cocaine or meth every weekend would be quickly transformed into an addicted daily customer, who had to buy and use all day to keep fentanyl withdrawals away.
All this created, in turn, an ominous churn. Fentanyl supplies out of Mexico meant there was no such thing as a long-term fentanyl addict. They died or got off the street. They were replaced by users who had survived inadvertent exposures to the drug in those counterfeit pills, or in another drug. They grew addicted, buying constantly until they, too, died or got into recovery.
During the pandemic, overdose deaths leaped to annual records in the United States, fuelled largely by these fentanyl supplies.
The Mexican traffickers’ discovery of fentanyl, meanwhile, opened them to new synthetic drugs they might exploit. Buried in online chemistry literature are many more synthetic drugs that pharmaceutical companies invented but never sold commercially.
“What they figured out is, ‘We just have to go down the chemicals that are already made. Keep going down the list,’” a retired Chicago trafficker who for years had deep connections to Sinaloa, once told me. “Every day they’re looking for a new chemical.”
To do that, they need chemists who understand the literature and how to dig through it. In Mexico, he said, “right now, chemists are in higher demand than beautiful women.”
A veterinarian’s sedative, Xylazine, began appearing with fentanyl in Philadelphia, and has since been detected in many parts of the United States, always with fentanyl.
Fentanyl laced with Xylazine, the animal tranquilizer known on the street as Tranq, at a safe house in Sinaloa State.MERIDITH KOHUT/The New York Times News Service
Last summer, a chemical with no known drug-like effects began appearing with fentanyl around the U.S. BTMPS, as it’s known (short for: Bis[2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidyl]sebacate), is actually an industrial chemical used to protect plastics from degradation due to ultraviolet light.
All this feels as if traffickers and their chemists have been groping to “innovate” new variations around their goldmine, fentanyl – the way any consumer corporation might with a flagship product.
In recent years, other synthetic opioids have appeared. A family of drugs known as nitazenes appeared in 2019, with an analogue called isotonitazene claiming its first life. Since then, it and other nitazene variations have come and gone.
As long as Mexican traffickers count on almost unlimited access to precursor chemicals – due to inaction by the Mexican government and ensured by the assault weapons purchased in and smuggled from the United States – they are unlikely to ever return to growing drugs.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has used U.S. frustration with fentanyl supplies to threaten to impose tariffs on Mexico and, quite a bit less understandably, on Canada.
For Mexico, his threats may be the jolt to action that the country has long needed. The previous president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, spent his six years in office denying that fentanyl was produced in his country. Mexico’s current President, Claudia Sheinbaum, has used the threats to mount massive raids on fentanyl laboratories, especially in Sinaloa, and to extradite to the United States 29 drug capos from Mexican prisons.
Should all this disrupt traffickers and rejuvenate demoralized Mexican police, then perhaps it will be worthwhile, especially for the people of Mexico who have lived for a generation now under traffickers’ brazen impunity and violence. Of course, that, too, depends on U.S. willingness to do something about assault weapons flowing south to Mexico.
The tariff threats on Canada, however, seem entirely counterproductive, creating deep anger and animosity where what is needed is enhancing collaboration already under way.
In expanding collaboration among the three countries – and China as well – lies the path toward disrupting supplies of illicit fentanyl, the most addictive, profitable and deadly drug any of the three countries has seen on its streets.