Fentanyl’s pipeline to the US may be drying up

This summer, Dan Ciccarone, a physician and street drug researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, sent a team to collect data on city streets in areas where illicit fentanyl has been a killer for years. They found something unexpected.

“The fentanyl supply is drying up for some reason,” Ciccarone said. “Hang out on the street, talk to people – the drugs are hard to find and more expensive.”

When street fentanyl began to proliferate in America’s street drug supply starting in 2012, most experts believed the deadly synthetic opioid was unstoppable. Fentanyl is cheap, easy to make and hugely profitable. The black market supply chain that fuels America’s demand for the drug is controlled by some of the most sophisticated and ruthless criminal gangs in the world.

But Ciccarone said he’s heard from street drug experts in the U.S. over the past six months who also saw significantly less fentanyl and fewer overdoses.

“I’m from Ohio, I’ve heard from West Virginia, and I’ve heard from Maryland and Arizona, and they’re all telling me the same thing: There’s some kind of supply shortage on the streets,” he said.

There are skeptics, people who question this trend, but some of the top drug policy analysts in the US, as well as experts with close ties to street fentanyl markets, believe the data points to a major disruption in the deadly supply chain of fentanyl.

“It’s a development that many drug policy experts could not have anticipated,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution, who researches international criminal organizations that make and traffic fentanyl.

She said drug gangs appear to be trafficking less fentanyl and are also “adulterating” or diluting the potency of the fentanyl being sold. “Everyone is surprised by the extent of fentanyl adulteration,” Felbab-Brown said. “And even more importantly due to claims in certain places in the US that there is not enough fentanyl available.”

Researchers generally agree that there has been an “unprecedented” decline in fentanyl purity in some parts of the United States. Labs that test street fentanyl find that it is cut or diluted much more aggressively, often with an industrial chemical known as BTMPS.

An industrial chemical mixed with fentanyl

“We’ve had samples that were all BTMPS and no fentanyl,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, a North Carolina addiction researcher who tests fentanyl samples collected from illicit drug markets across the country.

Edward Sisco, a research chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who helped analyze fentanyl samples, said it is a mystery why drug gangs would use BTMPS in fentanyl mixtures. There is no evidence that the substance causes users to get high.

“It is often used to prevent UV degradation of plastics, and it also has some other industrial applications,” Sisco said, adding that it appears the chemical is being deliberately added to fentanyl powders early in the supply chain, possibly in drug labs in Mexico. .

“When something new comes to the drug market, it usually comes to one geographic location. It is very unusual to see (BTMPS) appearing all over the country at once,” he said.

Although BTMPS is considered toxic to humans, it does not cause overdoses or instant death.

Some drug policy experts believe these shifts in fentanyl supply are factors in the sudden national decline in fentanyl-related deaths, which fell by about 20% last year, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Dennis Cauchon, a harm reduction activist in Ohio, believes this pattern is visible in his state, where fatal overdoses have fallen even faster, by about a third, by 2024. “If you look at the share of fentanyl in Ohio’s drug supply, you can predict how many deaths there will be,” Cauchon said. “So the real question is, why has fentanyl decreased?”