Missouri's Fentanyl Problem: Its Path to the United States

 "MX" for Borderland Beat; The Salem News

Fentanyl is a serious threat to Missourians. In November 2017, a man was caught on i-55 carrying almost fve pounds of fentanyl—enough to kill 40 times the population of New Madrid County, where police stopped him (source: Safe Medicines).

There are two major means of entry of illegal synthetic opioids into the U.S.: a route into the U.S. by the postal service, and routes into the U.S. used by drug traffickers. In both cases, Chinese chemical factories are the source of these synthetic opioids arriving in the U.S.

Clandestine laboratories in Mexico convert Chinese fentanyl precursors to fentanyl and combine IMF with heroin. The Mexican cartels “tend to use crude methods” to make it and “they just take the fentanyl and stir it with a spoon,” said Doug Coleman of the DEA. Illegal fentanyl is then trafficked into the U.S. market, already combined with heroin and other drugs. The U.S. General Accountability Office has determined that Canada, as well as Mexico, is a supply route for drug traffickers.

American drug dealers can order fentanyl and analogues to be sent by mail from China, often diverted through another country. One Chinese drug dealer who operates openly on the Chinese social media WeChat said that sending drugs through the Chinese mail to the U.S. is easy: “We have our people in the postal companies.” Chinese sources can be found on the Internet that will ship fentanyl analogues that are still legal in China.

Chinese dealers can also provide fentanyl and analogues that are now illegal in China, using underground sites on the dark web and accepting payment for the drugs with underground currency such as Bitcoin. Shipment within the U.S. for all these drugs is illegal, so packages are misleadingly labeled and often shipped via other countries to avoid seizure by U.S. authorities. Unfortunately, most packages arrive to the U.S. drug dealer or consumer intact.

New fentanyl analogues from Chinese factories

One reason for the proliferation of fentanyl analogues is that many of these variants are still legal in China. Despite ongoing negotiations with the U.S., the Chinese government chooses not to regulate the entire class of fentanyl drugs but instead regulates fentanyl itself and a subset of fentanyl analogues, which it schedules one at a time, if it chooses to schedule them at all. A New York Times article describes the Chinese chemical industry as “vast, and poorly supervised, with between 160,000 and 400,000 chemical companies operating legally, illegally, or somewhere in between.”

Besides fentanyl and analogues, the industry produces large quantities of inexpensive generic drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients used by more advanced pharmaceutical companies to synthesize more profitable medicines.

Chinese chemists are adept at developing new analogues not yet regulated in China or other countries, and their companies can sell these legally on the Internet without penalties in China, staying a step ahead of the Chinese government.

In this way, Chinese chemical factories can follow Chinese regulations and continue to sell fentanyl analogues and precursors on the open Internet. Local authorities favor industrial growth, which is substantial for the thousands of successful Chinese chemical companies.

There are many ways to modify fentanyl and retain activity; thus, dozens of new compounds continue to be created. Fentanyl is modified by replacement of its propionyl chain or by replacement of its ethylphenyl moiety. The resulting analogues are further modified by substitution with fluoro-, chloro-, or methoxy- groups at the N-phenyl ring, to create analogues such as isobutyryl fentanyl-alpha-methylfentanyl butanamide. Toxicology reports from overdose victims increasingly demonstrate a number of fentanyl analogues such as acryl fentanyl.

Wuhan, China is headquarters for Chinese fentanyl, fentanyl precursor production

“The bulk of them (fentanyl precursors) seemed to come from a single corporation,” run by Ye Chuan Fe, purportedly “once the richest man in Wuhan.” Fe controls Yuancheng Group, a legal conglomerate that includes many chemical manufacturers that produce a wide array of chemicals, from food additives to pharmaceuticals. Yuancheng’s success has been repeatedly praised by Communist Party officials. Another chemical company based in Wuhan selling fentanyl and analogs is 5A Pharmatech, led by Yan Xiaobing, who was placed on the Justice Department’s list of international drug traffickers.

Chinese chemical and pharmaceutical companies “continue to operate with little oversight,” concluded a 2017 report about fentanyl from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Conditions in these labs vary. Some labs are clean and up to U.S. pharmaceutical standards. However retired DEA agent Dennis Wichern, said, “Some of the pictures of these Chinese labs are sickening. It reminds me of the old meth-lab days when I worked in Missouri.”

A newsletter in 2020 from Ben Westhoff stated that disruption in the supply chain of fentanyl from China resulted in a shortage of opioids available from dealers. This, in addition to social distancing measures and fears regarding COVID-19, resulted in increased difficulty in obtaining drugs. Very preliminary data demonstrated a transient decrease in opioid-related deaths in the St. Louis area. Dr. Rachel Winograd, Associate Professor at UMSL’s Missouri Institute of Mental Health and founder of MOHOPE.org and NOMODEATHS.org, heard from partners on the ground who noticed an increase in people who use drugs who say, in effect, it is “impossible to find my drug of choice. I’m ready to talk about treatment.”

Police in Jefferson County and Phelps County confirmed that prices for narcotics on the street rose somewhat.