Fentanyl arrived late in Spokane, but then exploded

As the fentanyl wave spread across the United States, federal prosecutors took notice and decided to crack down on it as soon as they saw the first traces of fentanyl in Eastern Washington.

“We knew fentanyl was coming, so we were kind of on the lookout for it,” said Caitlin Baunsgard, assistant district attorney for the Eastern District of Washington. “Because it’s so deadly, you’re seeing the devastation and the overdose deaths rolling in all over the country. It’s really, really depressing.”

The drug surfaced in the Tri-Cities in 2016 or 2017, shortly after the arrest of a doctor who prescribed opioids led to a shortage of the medication for users, Baunsgard said.

The first federal fentanyl cases in Eastern Washington involved just 100 pills.

When fentanyl began spreading throughout the Tri-Cities, prosecutors like Baunsgard played a game of whack-a-mole, charging dealers when they could. They learned from the accused that the drug was largely consumed in the Tri-Cities.

“It never got to Spokane,” she said. “We kept waiting.”

Eventually, fentanyl pills turned up in Yakima.

“Then it spread like wildfire,” she said.

Since 2021, the number of fentanyl seizures in Washington has increased dramatically. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Washington is now the state with the most seizures in the country, behind California and Arizona, two southern border states.

There has also been a dramatic increase in Spokane.

In 2021, Spokane police seized 10 fentanyl pills. So far in 2024, they have seized more than 76,000, along with large amounts of the drug in powder form.

According to the DEA and federal prosecutors, most of the fentanyl in the United States comes directly from drug cartels in Mexico and Central America.

“Our district is a drug transportation hub,” Baunsgard said.

Money moves

“Our work on drug trafficking has been a huge part of the office for decades, and the current focus on fentanyl is largely due to the changing availability of that drug in our community and across the United States,” said Vanessa Waldref, U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington.

The dramatic increase in fentanyl seizures over the past five years is partly due to the increasing flow of drugs into the country, Baunsgard said, but increased law enforcement and public recognition of the problem also play a role.

When fentanyl first came on the market, police had no way to test for it.

Police might arrest someone with cocaine or meth and then a few small pills. Those pills were opioids at first, but at some point they became fentanyl, Baunsgard said. Often, officers focused on the larger amount of the known drug when it came to investigations.

“Five years ago, the fentanyl trade was in its infancy,” said David F. Reames, special agent in charge of the DEA’s Seattle Field Division.

During Reames’ 20 years with the DEA, cartels were central to the drug trade. Fentanyl grew relatively quickly compared to other drugs.

After the drug was primarily processed into pills abroad and brought into the US around 2018, the cartels expanded their operations.

According to him, the chemicals that produce fentanyl are mainly shipped from China.

It is easier to make than other drugs, such as methamphetamine.

“If you know what you’re doing, the saying goes, ‘You can make it in a bucket,’” Baunsgard said.

Not only is the medicine easy to make, but it is also easy to make money from.

Spokane Police Lt. Rob Boothe said the quantity has increased while the price per pill has dropped.

“Back then, if we made a fentanyl bust, and it was five pills, and they were probably going for $8 to $12 a pill and it was considered a significant haul, like, ‘Holy cow, we got this, this is a big deal,'” Boothe said. “And recently we bought 20,000 pills at a time for less than a dollar a piece.”

Even though costs have come down, it is still profitable for a cartel. Tens of thousands of dollars of investment results in hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit, he said.

Two paths

There are two common ways to sue someone in federal court on a fentanyl charge.

The first, Baunsgard says, is a story common to all drugs.

A person grows up in an environment of drugs, in a vicious circle of poverty, addiction or abuse and becomes desensitized to it.

“Some of it seems generational,” she said.

They start dealing to feed their addiction, but the amount of drugs grows and grows. If the state justice system can’t change their course, they could end up in federal court, Baunsguard said.

“We have people who are drug addicts, who have been in the business for so long, they have a significant criminal history, and usually some form of violence,” she said. “They find a plug or a source who can supply them with a large amount of drugs and then they get caught with that large amount of drugs.”

An example of this is Jordy Deboer, who was recently sentenced to 22 years in federal prison after being arrested with approximately 24 pounds of fentanyl.

Deboer, 32, had a “horrible” childhood, said his attorney, David Miller.

Miller wrote in court documents that his mother married multiple times, with each stepfather bringing a new form of abuse.

He started using methamphetamine when he was 17, Deboer told the judge during his sentencing.

He went to prison at 20 and was clean when he was released in 2015. He met a woman at church and helped her raise her young daughter while he worked in concrete.

Then the couple relapsed.

This time, the amount of drugs was larger than ever before. He was caught in April 2022 trafficking drugs for a drug trafficking organization in the Tri-Cities. While he awaited trial on those charges, a federal judge allowed him to seek treatment.

While he was released for treatment, Deboer began dealing drugs again, telling the judge he didn’t realize how strongly he was drawn to fentanyl and meth.

He was arrested in March 2023 at a Spokane Valley motel with kilos of fentanyl.

The other path is directly linked to the cartel, Baunsguard said.

“They do it for the money,” she said.

Using cellphones and apps, cartels use a model called the “hotline or dial a pound,” where the drug buyer in the U.S. calls and negotiates with someone in Mexico, often for a large quantity of drugs, she said.

Then a runner, who is usually young and does not speak English, will bring the drugs into the US

“They are the ones who are at risk of being caught with large quantities of drugs,” Baunsgard said.

This siloed approach makes it extremely difficult to reach the upper echelons of the cartel. People in Washington who provide information about how they obtained the fentanyl don’t know much.

They said they called someone named Junior or Alex who delivered the drugs to them, but they never met them, Baunsgard said.

“If you buy a drug that is larger than a user quantity, if you buy it from a drug distribution point, you are almost certainly dealing with a drug cartel,” said the DEA’s Reames.

When the runners are arrested, they have little incentive to provide information about the cartel in their home countries, she said. To deport someone from Mexico, prosecutors need a witness to swear that they saw someone commit a crime with their own eyes.

“Those extradition affidavits go to the Mexican government, unsealed, uncensored, and anyone can access them,” Baunsgard said, describing the risk to witnesses.

Often, the drug couriers are not U.S. citizens. If convicted, they are deported after their release from prison, at which point the cartel can threaten or harm them.

Although it is difficult to reach prominent people in the cartel, it does happen. Brian Zazueta, son of Adoldfo Zazueta who leads a branch of the Sinaloa cartel, pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute meth in June.

Brian Zazueta, better known as Junior, was arrested in 2023 with the meth and about 22,000 fentanyl pills in a Kennewick stash. Investigators say he was a middle manager in the drug organization.

According to court documents, prosecutors will propose a 15-year prison sentence at Zazueta’s sentencing in September.

Spokane and Washington as a whole have become a hub for drug trafficking to other states, where dealers can sell the pills for higher prices.

“The joke in the drug world is that if you make it through the panhandle of Idaho, you’re saved,” Baunsgard said.

Reames still isn’t entirely sure why fentanyl is such a big problem in Washington, but it’s something he and his team are investigating. In the meantime, he’ll continue to work on breaking up drug trafficking organizations to give users some breathing room to hopefully seek treatment.

“If you can take out a whole distribution network, everybody, those hundreds of people that they know to get their daily (supply), then they have five or six people that they can reach out to to buy drugs,” he said. “If we arrest all those people at once, it gives the customers some breathing room, so they can’t go find drugs right away.”