The stuff seems to not be hard to produce. Regular kitchens can suffice and the precursors are allegedly pretty widely available used for lots of other manufacturing.
So why aren’t the cartels just doing a Walter White and producing the supply closer to the demand? Certainly if smuggling gets harder that as the go around seems easy enough, as long as there is the demand.
I’m clearly missing something.
I would assume for the same reason that clothing isn’t manufactured here. Labor is cheaper elsewhere.
It’s probably a lot more difficult to run a clandestine lab than they make it look on tv. You still have to smuggle in or otherwise procure precursor APIs.
According to the DEA* there has been some small-scale manufacturing in the United States.
No idea if purchase of precursors in this country is being tracked, or how the cost compares to what it is in other nations (most likely they’re considerably cheaper to buy in China and Mexico).
*note that the DEA article seems to be perpetuating the claim that dangerous or fatal overdosing can be caused by casual skin absorption. It’s an urban myth.
That is the main reason. Precursors to fentanyl (and other synthetic opioids) are tracked, and it is much easier to smuggle the comparatively small volume of finished product than all of the precursor agents, and also much easier to run a lab pretty openly in a country like Mexico where corruption is rife at all levels with virtually no oversight than in the United States where there are multiple layers of law enforcement (at least, for now) and such a lab has to be kept secret, as do the workers and anyone transporting material to the lab or product from it.
It is certainly possible to synthesize all of the precursors from relatively common compounds, and someone with a graduate degree in chemistry and some practical industrial lab knowledge (or a second degree in chemical engineering) should be able to set up a lab to do so, but then you have a sizable operation that cannot be easily moved, and workers. The underground lab portrayed in Breaking Bad was pretty reasonably equipped for a small pharma lab capable of producing methamphetamine using relatively innocuous starting compounds that wouldn’t draw attention (except for the aquaous methylamine although that was mostly a plot device to complicate their schemes) but I doubt that two guys alone could have produced as much volume of refined product per week. There is a lot of physical work in not just the synthesis itself but monitoring, physical processing, and cleaning everything thoroughly between runs to avoid contamination.
Stranger
The Chinese have whole factories that make it. The cost is nothing compared to what a Walter White could possibly do.
The only extra cost they have is shipping it in via Mexico. Smuggling less potent drugs into the US from Mexico has been worked out for decades.
Another issue is quality control. You really have to know exactly how much functional Fentanyl is in a batch. Err by a little bit and you have fewer customers and a lot of police looking for you. A large scale facility can do better QC.
As noted it’s similar to making your own clothes. Esp. think in terms of something like running shoes. Sure, you could do it at home with various materials and a waffle iron, but a factory is the way to go.
I don’t know for sure, but part of me wonders if its because you need such small doses of fentanyl that you don’t need to smuggle much.
A recreational dose of a fentanyl is maybe 300 micrograms, which means that a kilo has over 3 million doses in it. So you smuggle 50 kilos and thats enough for close to 160 million recreational doses. 50 kilos is not hard to smuggle.
Like others have said, the precursors are easier to get in other countries. Combined with the low amount you need to smuggle. Combined with the higher quality control when it is manufactured abroad in labs vs in someone’s kitchen.
Also its pretty cheap to manufacture. I remember reading a book about cocaine smugglers in the 80s. I think they got paid something like $3000 for every kilo they smuggled from Colombia to the US (they’d fly flights with several hundred kilos each flight). I forget the exact number, but it was something like that. So China manufactures a kilo of fentanyl for maybe $2000, you pay a smuggler $3000 to smuggle it, and its still much higher purity and higher quality than domestically made stuff.
I heard this interesting audio story on the radio during the week. The reporter visits a fentanyl cook house and they talk about why it’s in Mexico.
Michael Barbaro
Natalie, I guess what you’re saying about the ease of production makes me wonder why it has to be done in Mexico. Why can’t this same process occur in Texas or Brooklyn, for that matter?
Natalie Kitroeff
Yeah, I mean, Michael, obviously, you could, theoretically, make fentanyl in Texas. But the conditions are not as good as they are in Mexico. There’s an entire infrastructure that really supports this
I think the law enforcement in Mexico is so corrupt that they are virtually on the payroll.
IANARDU - I don’t think most recreational drug users are going out to buy fentanyl. As said upthread, fentanyl is fairly cheap to produce, so it get’s added to other drugs to enhance the “high”, and thus improve the margin on their other popular drugs they sell. That’s why it also ends up being unassumingly consumed and killing people.
Dealers are selling drugs to addicts. Is there really a need for marketing?
Less marketing than cutting cost by cutting the product with something cheaper.
Stranger
Haven’t clicked yet but one point is that as marketing it is a bad tool: you literally kill off your customer base. Demand has been decreasing precisely for that reason, as I understand it.
Yes, I don’t think I said anything about marketing.
No @Little_Nemo did.
I may have used the word first in this thread but what Omar was describing in his post is marketing even if he didn’t call it that.
I beg to differ. Cutting your product with cheaper fillers (even ones that still give you a high) isn’t marketing…its margin improvement. No dealers are marketing that they added a deadly filler to the drugs they sell.
You said, in this thread:
If the manufacturers were just seeking to lower production costs, they’d add talcum powder to the heroin they were making. That would be margin improvement.
But if the manufacturers are “enhancing” the heroin by adding fentanyl, they are seeking to make the product more desirable to the drug users. That’s marketing.
The goal is to produce a similar enough high at a lower cost, to improve the margin without losing the repeat business (other than to death). A higher or better high would be marketing. A similar high sold for the same that costs less to the seller is just higher profit margin.