At a rural property an hour outside Vancouver in October, Canadian police found 2.5 million doses of fentanyl and 528 gallons of chemicals in a shipping container and a storage unit. Six months earlier, they raided a home in a cookie-cutter Vancouver subdivision packed with barrels of fentanyl-making chemicals, glassware and lab equipment.
Thousands of miles away outside Toronto, police in August found what is believed to be the largest fentanyl lab so far in Canada — hidden at a property 30 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Niagara Falls, N.Y.
U.S. authorities say they have little indication that Canadian-made fentanyl is being smuggled south in significant quantities. But at a time when record numbers of people are dying from overdoses in the United States, the spread of clandestine fentanyl labs in Canada has the potential to undermine U.S. enforcement efforts and worsen the opioid epidemic in both nations.
Investigators in Canada say the labs are producing fentanyl for domestic users and for export to Australia, New Zealand and, they assume, the United States.
AKA the premise of the article.
I was always under the impression that most opioids were produced “legally” by under-regulated pharmaceutical corporations, but I’ll be the first to admit I really know nothing about this stuff.
In the USA, that’s not the case. There are obviously a lot of opioids produced by pharmaceutical corporations. These are the pills in pharmacies.
However, the opioids on the street are typically imported. They’re a mixture of herion (naturally derived from poppies) and synthetic opioids. Most of the synthetics are much stronger than heroin. Fentanyl can be 50x stronger.
Most of the labs that produce synthetic opioids are in China. The drugs get shipped into the USA.
It’s bad news if fentanyl labs are popping up in North America. This will only make it cheaper and more available.
My limited understanding from the news articles I’ve read is that they are easy to make in a quasi-legal way in the United States (sorry, I’m not familiar with how different it may be in Canada) because one can legally purchase the ingredients with ease from China. Therefore, the US has finally begun working with China (or I should probably say China has finally begun working with the US) to halt or limit that flow of ingredients.