Last year, more than 31,000 people in the United States died after taking fentanyl or one of its close chemical relatives. No other drug in modern history has killed more people in a year.
Melissa and Daryl McKinsey first heard about “Mexican Oxy” last year when their 19-year-old son Parker called in tears.Several months earlier, a friend had given Parker a baby-blue pill that was stamped on one side with the letter M.
Today, officials say the majority is smuggled from Mexico, where it is remaking the drug trade as traffickers embrace it over heroin, which is more difficult and expensive to produce.While heroin is made from poppy plants that grow only in specific climates and take months to cultivate, fentanyl and other so-called synthetics are cooked from chemicals in makeshift laboratories in a matter of hours.
Parker, who had a rebellious spirit and had struggled with school, was devastated when he failed to attract interest from college teams. After graduating in the spring of 2017, he fell into a depression, and slipped from smoking marijuana into stronger drugs.“He could die,” Bryan warned.The morning they dropped him off, his mother, an elementary school principal, thought to herself: “This is the worst day of my life.”That day, however, was still to come.
Pacheco was 8 years old when he began helping his father cultivate poppies on their hillside farm in the state of Guerrero. It was one of the few ways to make a living there.He didn’t know it, but the U.S. opioid epidemic was entering a new phase.For years, American doctors had been overprescribing oxycodone and similar painkillers. But increased regulation had made those pills harder to get legally, so addicts turned to heroin.
Four of Pacheco’s five children have migrated to the U.S. in search of work. There is not enough money to pay his youngest son’s $40 high school tuition or to buy candles for the altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe they keep in the corner of their house. In two years in the business, he said, he has acquired six vehicles. He recently opened a car wash as a means to launder money.was a Belgian chemist and pharmaceutical developer named Paul Janssen, who was looking for a painkiller more powerful than morphine when he synthesized fentanyl for the first time in 1960.
Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin, and ingesting just a few grains — as little as a quarter of a milligram — can be deadly. The narcotics trade in Mexico has become increasingly decentralized, in large part due to a decade-long strategy by the Mexican government to combat drug trafficking by capturing or killing cartel capos.
Keeping his business small was a choice he made after seeing law enforcement target powerful leaders, such as former Sinaloa chief Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.Dressed in flip-flops and a polo shirt, he said he got into the business 15 years ago, following in the footsteps of his father, a marijuana smuggler.
Though fentanyl has been good for business, he said it weighs on his conscience. When drugs are cooked in independent laboratories, errors can occur, and word has trickled back from his network of U.S. dealers that certain batches were bad, and probably caused deaths. Pitcher Bryan McKinsey reacts after throwing his last pitch for the save in a quarterfinal game May 3, 2018, against Notre Dame Preparatory High School.
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