Paramedics revive an overdose

victim in the Tenderloin district of

downtown San Francisco, July 2020
 THE REVERSE
OPIUM WARS
On the deadly trail of Fentanyl — from China
via Mexico to the streets and suburbs of
America, where it’s killing 200 people a day

By Stephen Gibbs in Manzanillo and Keiran Southern

in Tijuana, Los Angeles and San Francisco
 I
t was a distinctive smell, similar to vinegar,
seeping from the new-built home at the
top of the hill that prompted a resident in
Tijuana’s Lomas del Valle neighbourhood
to make an anonymous call to the police
in October last year.
A few nights later three patrol cars were
seen heading up the potholed road to the
elevated dusty area, a 50-minute drive and
a world away from the souvenir stores and
tequila bars of Mexico’s main northern
border city. Their target was a squat, grey
building that seemed in a permanently
stalled state of construction.
As police drew close they spotted two
men outside, loading bags into a car.
Catching sight of their unwelcome visitors,
the suspects bolted off into the darkness.
The officers knew they had the right place
and broke into the building. Inside they
found a makeshift laboratory equipped
with all the paraphernalia of synthetic drug
production. There were buckets, blenders
and a pill pressing machine. A thin layer of
acrid white powder coated every surface.
In one corner was a large icebox, the type
that might be used to take cold drinks to a
beach. It contained more than 300,000 light
blue pills of pure fentanyl. In total police
confiscated 207kg of the synthetic opiate,
enough to kill tens of millions of people,
and with a street value of about £4 million.
Fentanyl abuse is the world’s deadliest
drug crisis. The front line of the calamity is
just ten miles from that raided lab, over the
border in the United States. As many as 200
Americans a day are dying from overdoses
of what some pushers call the “Crazy One”.
The drug is most commonly taken in pill
form by abusers or injected. Some smoke it,
which overcomes the struggle for hardened
addicts of finding a vein. Users describe
PREVIOUS PAGES: NICK OTTO. THIS PAGE: FGR
the “f-rush”, an out-of-body euphoria that
lasts several hours, before the brain craves
another hit. Each trip is a dance with death:
the dose needed to produce a narcotic effect
is just fractionally below the amount that
can trigger unconsciousness, breathing
difficulties and heart failure. Many users
do not survive their first hit.
Last year the drug killed more Americans
aged between 18 and 49 than traffic accidents
Above and left: Mexican police find
more than 300,000 fentanyl pills
and drug-making equipment in a
raid in Tijuana, October 2023
or guns. In the Canadian state of British
Columbia the statistics are more stark, with
unregulated drug overdoses, mostly from
fentanyl, the leading cause of death for all
people aged 10-59, according to health
officials. The impact in Europe has been
minuscule by comparison. In the European
Union about 200 people are believed to have
died of fentanyl-related overdoses in 2023,
while for the past five years in the UK the
number has hovered around 60 deaths a year.
One theory to explain why, so far, this
seems a peculiarly US and Canada-focused
scourge is that both countries are seeing
the effect of decades of overprescription of
opioid painkillers by doctors. There were 227
million prescriptions issued for legal opioids
FROM A BUSINESS
in the US in 2015. Even if only a tiny fraction
of those patients sought to continue their
habit once their course ran out, that is a
PERSPECTIVE, bonanza for the drug runners. British
Columbia’s experimental decriminalisation
ALMOST THE
of the possession of hard drugs, including
fentanyl, in January 2023 has also been
blamed for the rise in deaths there.
ONLY FLAW OF
For pushers, fentanyl has some intrinsic
advantages over other addictive drugs.
Unlike cocaine and heroin, its ingredients
THE DRUG IS ITS
do not have to be cultivated from coca or
poppies: its chemical components, largely
EFFICACY IN
produced in China, can be bought easily
online, often legally. From a business
perspective, almost the only flaw of the drug
KILLING OFF ITS is its efficacy in killing off its client base.
Politicians appear powerless to stop the
CLIENT BASE
scourge. In 2016 Donald Trump vowed as
presidential candidate to stem “100 per cent”
of the flow of drugs, including fentanyl, ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 11
 into the US during his term of office. Opiate
overdoses surged under his administration.
Shocking images of zombie-like addicts
slumped on city streets from San Francisco
to New York have prompted calls for
urgent action — but the death toll has
remained high under President Biden,
who has described the crisis as an
“American tragedy”. Last year he made a
series of pledges including expanded access
to addiction treatment and heightened
co-operation with China to stop the chain
of supply. His administration has been the
first to shift more resources to treatment
than interdiction — a tacit admission that
the flow can probably never be stopped.
Some experts warn that the best hope is
that demand plateaus in a saturated market,
now the drug has penetrated every corner
of the country. “For the most part there
aren’t any more places that are not yet hit,”
says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor and
drug policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon
University’s Heinz College in Pennsylvania.
In 2022 the US recorded about 109,000
overdose deaths, according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),
of which 70 per cent were synthetic opioids
including fentanyl — a slight increase on
the 2021 death toll following two years of
steep rises. “I think we’re at a peak but I don’t
see the decline from the peak happening
quickly,” says Caulkins, who believes the
war may be unwinnable. “Fundamentally
dangerous drugs” such as fentanyl, he
predicts, are here to stay.
Skid Row to the Golden Gate Bridge
In the homeless areas of San Francisco and
Los Angeles, fentanyl users are easy to spot
by their stupor-like demeanour mid-hit.
More than a dozen cases can be found in
a ten-minute walk around Skid Row in LA ,
where about 4,500 homeless people
congregate every day. One heavy-set man is
smoking a pipe at a bus shelter and speaks
only to confirm, nonchalantly, that the white
smoke he is exhaling is from fentanyl.
Other addicts take refuge in their tattered
tents. Clutching burnt foil in swollen hands,
a man and a woman in their twenties are
getting high on the drug together. They
seem not to notice the rat scurrying over
their filthy bedding.
Others in Skid Row tell stories of their
brushes with death. Nicole Cosio, 45,
painfully thin, with her skin drawn tightly
over protruding shoulder blades, says she
overdosed some months ago and had to
be revived with naloxone — the antidote
that can reverse the effects of opioids and
restore breathing. She describes the whole
experience as terrifying.
“It’s worse than heroin,” says Cosio,
who is also a crystal meth user. She says
her fentanyl trip left her awake for four days
GETTY IMAGES
in a delirious paranoid state, convinced
that her neighbours in Skid Row were
trying to steal her disability cheques. She
The rise of a mass killer
Drug overdose deaths in the US, in thousands
Fentanyl and synthetic opioids
Methamphetamine (and similar)
Cocaine
Prescription opioids
Heroin
2000 2005 2010 2015
Source: National Center for Health Statistics at
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
counts fentanyl as her biggest mistake.
“It’s the craziest thing I have ever done,”
she says, her hollow face a testament to
years of drug abuse.
While these squalid scenes are the most
publicised images of fentanyl abuse, one
of the striking aspects of the drug is how
it crosses class boundaries. Previous drug
epidemics, such as crack cocaine in the
1980s, came to be associated with poorer
communities. Fentanyl finds its victims
at every level of society.
The Leopolds were a picture-book
American family. Michelle, 58, and her
husband, Jeff, 57, run six hardware stores
in Marin County, a short drive across the
Left: Trevor Leopold
with his parents,
Michelle and Jeff.
He died in 2019,
aged 18, after
taking a pill laced
with fentanyl
Below: an evidence
bag of fentanyl pills
disguised as the
opioid painkiller
oxycodone in
California, 2020
Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and
the fourth richest county in all of America.
Living in the small community of Greenbrae,
their beautiful home is surrounded by hills
80
forested with oaks. The year-round sun and
ready access to the San Francisco Bay make
60
the area perfect for rowers and boaters.
Trevor Leopold, a handsome teenager
40 with blue eyes, grew to love the outdoor
life on the doorstep of his family home.
20 A former boy scout, he was an avid
birdwatcher able to identify almost any
0 species from its call. He collected rocks
2020 and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of
gems and minerals. “He loved learning,”
says his mother, who bears a striking
resemblance to her son.
In 2016 the Leopolds noticed a change
in Trevor’s bright disposition, just as he
turned 15. They knew he was occasionally
smoking strong cannabis. “His personality
completely changed,” Michelle says.
“I learnt about today’s high-potency THC
[tetrahydrocannabinol] and realised that
was what was causing this lovely, sweet,
caring, gentle person to become violent.”
Desperate to get their son back, the
Leopolds sent Trevor on wilderness retreats,
with little success. They also booked him
into several rehab centres. By the time he
turned 18 there were signs of improvement.
He graduated from high school and began
studying at Sonoma State University. But
just months into his degree, in November
2019, he was dead. Trevor, his mother says,
had bought four pills, believing them to be
prescription painkillers. One was laced with
fentanyl. Michelle, Jeff and their 21-year-old
son, Parker, now live with the grief that
afflicts thousands of American families.
The China connection
Fentanyl was first developed by the Belgian
physician Dr Paul Janssen in the late 1950s.
Approximately a hundred times more
powerful than morphine, it was designed
as an intravenous anaesthetic to alleviate
severe pain following cardiac and vascular
surgeries. It soon gained a place on the
World Health Organisation’s list of ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 13
 essential medicines and is still used today
as a highly effective painkiller, particularly
in the care of terminal cancer.
By the early 2000s reports began to
emerge of illicit recreational use, with
drug addicts chewing on the slow-release
medical patches or squeezing out the gel
inside and injecting themselves. In 2016
millions heard the name of the drug for the
first time when it was revealed that the pop
superstar Prince had died from an overdose.
It has been over the past three years,
though, that illegal use has exploded. Some
experts say boredom during the pandemic
drove abuse. There has also been
speculation that China, as the main source
of the chemicals needed to produce
fentanyl, is deliberately allowing the US to
be flooded by a drug that undermines its
society from within — just as Britain and
other western powers were accused of
doing, in reverse, during the Opium Wars
of the 19th century.
Beijing has consistently rejected this
accusation, saying the West is seeking to
blame others for its own degeneracy.
Yet there can be no hiding China’s role,
willing or not, in the production of the drug
that is sometimes known on streets of Los
Angeles as “China Girl”. The main reason
is a logistical one. China has the biggest
chemical manufacturing sector in the world
— with about 45 per cent market share.
If anyone, from drug cartels to legitimate
medicine manufacturers, needs chemical
ingredients, China is a first port of call.
Fentanyl sold as a recreational drug has
no set formula. There are several varieties,
using a combination of chemicals — as
many as ten — in the production process.
Most of the ingredients are also used to
manufacture mainstream products, from
paint to pesticides. One, sodium
borohydride, is a common bleaching agent.
In the early 2000s both pure fentanyl
and the chemicals needed to manufacture
it would normally be shipped directly from
China to the US. Intense pressure from
Washington to curb that trade, culminating
in a May 2019 declaration by the Beijing
government that fentanyl and two of its
precursors would be categorised as
controlled substances, led to a sharp drop
in the number of seizures at US ports.
The smuggling did not stop, however. It
just shifted south, to Mexico.
ALEJANDRA RAJAL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, REUTERS
The Mexican drug cartels step in
Over the past 15 years synthetic drugs —
the first was crystal meth — have begun
to cut into a market long dominated by
cocaine and heroin. As that business has
grown, important cross-Pacific links have
been formed between Mexican cartels
— with their decades of experience of
trafficking drugs to the US — and their
Chinese chemical suppliers. It has proved
enormously profitable for both sides.
A window into this deadly alliance was
Fentanyl entering
the US from Mexico
Tijuana
MEXICO
Manzanillo
Chemicals for
making fentanyl
imported
from China 500 miles
provided last year by a former senior figure
in the most established criminal group in
all of Mexico: the Sinaloa cartel.
Dámaso López-Serrano, who is currently
co-operating with US prosecutors under
a witness protection scheme, is a godson
of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the founder
of the Sinaloa cartel and the most notorious
drug lord alive today. El Chapo was
extradited to the US in 2017 and is serving a
life sentence for murder and other offences.
In an interview with a Mexican journalist
published on the CrashOut substack site last
year, López-Serrano detailed how members
of the Sinaloa cartel made several visits to
China over the past decade, specifically to
discover how to make fentanyl.
“We sent people who worked with us
to China and there they were introduced
to everything, from how it is made, what it
Left: corruption is
alleged to be rife
at the port in
Manzanillo, Mexico
Below: the
Chinese-Mexican
businessman Zhenli
Ye Gon, escorted
by Interpol agents
in Mexico, 2016
has, what it doesn’t have, how much you have
to put in,” López-Serrano told the journalist
Luis Chaparro. He described how, once
his former associates began to import the
precursor chemicals from China to produce
their own version of fentanyl, they realised
they had hit the jackpot. For every dollar
invested, the criminal organisation was
getting back $20. Even small-time smugglers,
López-Serrano said, were able to net “30 or
50 million dollars” a year.
One of the early alleged pioneers of
the China-Mexico drug trade was the
Shanghai-born Mexico-based businessman
Zhenli Ye Gon. In 2007 his sumptuous
mock-château home in Mexico City was
raided by police. Inside they found $207
million in cash, spilling out of cupboards.
The haul, weighing two tonnes, took
detectives two days to count. US drug
agents claimed the magnate, a colourful
character who once boasted he had lost
$126 million in Las Vegas casinos, used his
legally registered pharmaceutical company
as a front to provide the Mexican gangs
with the chemicals needed to make crystal
meth, a predecessor of fentanyl.
“He was the one who really set up this
alliance between the Mexican drug cartels,
the Mexican drug trafficking networks and
the Chinese pharmaceutical industry,” says
Ioan Grillo, author of Gangster Warlords,
an account of the drugs-driven violence
in Latin America.
Ye Gon, who faced charges — later
dropped — in the US for importing an
ingredient used to produce crystal meth,
has always maintained he is innocent.
The control of fentanyl trafficking in
Mexico is now dominated by what is known
as the “narco juniors”, mostly sons of the
drug lords who established their dynastic
fortunes smuggling cocaine in the 1980s
onwards. The Guzmán family and the
Sinaloa cartel still play a key role in this
business, despite the imprisonment of
El Chapo. Since his arrest, four of his sons,
known as the “Chapitos”, have helped steer
their father’s empire into the trafficking and
production of fentanyl, according to Mexican
investigators and US prosecutors. ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 15
 Griselda
Martínez,
the mayor of
Manzanillo,
survived an
assassination
attempt in 2019
having vowed
to tackle police
corruption
In 2023, in a US indictment against two
of the brothers — Iván and Jesús Guzmán
Salazar — it was alleged that they used to
test the correct dosage of the fentanyl
they were developing by injecting it into
kidnap victims, until they overdosed.
Manzanillo, gateway to China
The city of Manzanillo, on Mexico’s Pacific
coast, was once best known for its glorious
natural bay and big-game fishing, which
made it a go-to destination for the 1970s
jet set. It was here that a bead-haired Bo
Derek emerged from the sea in the 1979
film 10, starring Dudley Moore. The money
in Manzanillo now comes not from louche
sunlounging tourists but from trade, of all
kinds, with Asia.
Over the past half-century, mirroring
the rise of China, Manzanillo’s port has
grown to become the busiest in Mexico,
handling 3.4 million containers a year.
But only a tiny fraction of those containers
is ever inspected. Since 2020, after years
under civilian control, Mexico’s customs
posts have been overseen by the military.
That change was made by President Andrés
Manuel López Obrador in an effort to
battle corruption. Four years on, an insider,
speaking on condition of anonymity,
believes the situation has deteriorated.
“Right now corruption is the worst it
has been in 20 years. It’s unbelievable,”
says the businessman, whose operation
is based inside the port. Synthetic drug
interdiction, he insists, is barely happening.
The first problem is that most of the
precursor chemicals enter Mexico legally.
The cartels set up fake pharmaceutical
companies inside the country, as Ye Gon
ALEJANDRA RAJAL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
allegedly did, and then order chemicals
from China — with all the paperwork intact.
The US has attempted to close this
loophole. In October last year the
Department of Justice unsealed eight
indictments against Chinese companies
and their employees, several of which have
addresses in the central city of Wuhan, on
charges of sending fentanyl precursors to
Mexico and the US. Some of the company
owners have said they are being falsely
The interception game
Seizures of fentanyl by US Customs and
Border Protection, in lbs (thousands)
2019 2020 2021 2022
Fiscal year
Source: US Customs and Border Protection
targeted; others appear to have vanished.
The US also says some Chinese companies
change the composition of the chemicals
they export so they appear to be for
legitimate industrial use, such as pesticides.
The businessman in Manzanillo says
such deception is in fact unnecessary
because, in his experience, a modest
bribe paid at the port enables anything to
pass through.
By way of example, he says the tax and
duties on a container with $100,000 worth
of goods should be about $30,000. But a
$6,000 “donation” paid at the port means
the tax bill is waived and the container
can leave without any further questions.
He adds that containers set aside for
inspection — usually owing to a tip-off
regarding drugs — often disappear by dawn.
“They say the cranes move alone in the
night here,” is his wry explanation.
This conversation is held at an outdoor
café in the heart of touristy Manzanillo.
Young families in beachwear browse the
nearby street stalls as the businessman
spells out the malignant power of
corruption inside the vast port.
“You don’t get mugged in the street
here. You can leave your car open and
nothing happens,” he says. “But when you
go inside the world of drugs, everything
changes. Then you can get killed.”
No one knows this better than the
mayor of Manzanillo, Griselda Martínez.
A petite, determined woman, as a child
she dreamt of becoming a nun. She was
elected mayor in 2018, having run on a
promise to clean up the police force. By
then it had been heavily infiltrated by two
gangs: the Sinaloa cartel and its rival, the
Jalisco New Generation. Martínez admits
she was naive when she began her role.
Nine months after taking office she
survived an assassination attempt while
being driven through the city on a routine
trip. Her car was not armoured.
“There were 36 shots,” she says. One
grazed her slightly, while her bodyguard
was shot in the face. He survived.
After that Martínez was warned by
intelligence officials she could never live in
her home again. For the past four years she
has been staying, alone, in government
buildings: a naval barracks, her city offices
30 and a support centre for vulnerable women.
She barely sees her family. Just one of her
three children still lives in Manzanillo.
20 At least ten guards with assault weapons
keep watch outside during our interview.
“I really don’t have a life any more,” she says.
10
“I breathe and I work. It is not a normal life.”
Martínez, 55, was born in the centre of
0 Manzanillo, which she remembers as a
quiet fishing backwater. “Everything we
2023
wanted was right there in the sea in front
of us — crabs, shrimp, whatever we
needed.” Crime, she recalls, was almost
unheard of. “In hot weather we all slept with
the doors open, with the windows open.”
The port, she says, has “polluted” her
home town. “With it came all this movement
of goods — and the movement of drugs.
They called the port progress, but progress
is quality of life, not this.”
Anyone in law enforcement is a potential
target. Martínez mentions, almost in
passing, that the second-in-command of
her police force survived a murder attempt
just a few days before we meet. Nizandro
Gonzaga had stopped to get a haircut at a
barber shop near his office when two armed
men burst in and unleashed a rain of
bullets, seriously wounding him. It was the
second attempt on his life in months and
the suspects are still at large. The barber
shop remains closed, its glass frontage
riddled with bullet holes.
Tijuana, gateway to America
The left-wing President López Obrador
has made modest steps to assist the United
States in tackling this crisis. One welcome
move last September was the extradition
to the US of 33-year-old Ovidio Guzmán,
El Chapo’s youngest son. He is facing
fentanyl trafficking charges.
Yet the López Obrador government
formally maintains the pretence that
fentanyl is not produced at any scale in
Mexico. In March 2023 its foreign ministry
declared that the security services had ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 17
 “no record” of any domestic fentanyl
production at all. The US Drug Enforcement
Agency and others, however, have
evidence that hundreds of labs have been
uncovered in Mexico.
Tijuana’s mayor, Montserrat Caballero,
just like her counterpart in Manzanillo, no
longer lives in her home. She has moved to
an army base for protection after receiving
threats. For security reasons Mexican police
forces are largely prohibited from giving
press interviews on fentanyl-related stories.
Those who accompany The Sunday Times
in Tijuana have their faces hidden by
balaclavas and all identifying numbers
on their bulletproof vests are concealed.
Last March a police officer spotted
a man putting a bag of pills into the boot
of a Toyota Corolla with California licence
plates in the Colinas del Sol neighbourhood,
just 25 minutes from the US border. The
suspect attempted to escape but was
swiftly apprehended. This led police to a
safe house that it transpired was run by the
Sinaloa cartel. One hundred kilograms of
fentanyl and crystal meth was recovered.
One of the suspects arrested in that
operation was from the same small city
— Badiraguato, with a population of only
3,700 — as El Chapo himself.
A 20-minute drive from the Tijuana
safe house are the neatly tarmacked hills of
the exclusive Buena Vista neighbourhood.
Pristine three-storey homes, which would
not look out of place in Beverly Hills,
boast sweeping views of the city. A closer
look at one Dallas-style townhouse at the
bottom of the hill shows it is riddled with
bullet marks, the remnants of a police
shootout with a senior cartel leader who
was living in the building.
Five minutes up the road, in a gated
community, is another house
indistinguishable from the elegant
residences alongside. Last year police raided
the property and recovered 75kg of fentanyl
in pill form, as well as 14 handguns and
five assault rifles. The home is six miles
from the US border, the busiest road
frontier in the world.
Cartels hire both Mexican and US
citizens to smuggle the easily concealed
pills across the border. Most of the
fentanyl in the US is believed to arrive
via legal entry points. The potency and
concentration of the drug means just three
lorryloads would be enough to supply the
entire US market for a year. The going rate
ALEJANDRA RAJAL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
for a courier, or “mule”, travelling by foot
and taking 1,000 pills is about $500 per
crossing. Cartels recruit many of the
young carriers via social media, with
discreet job opportunity adverts.
Amid heightened checks on the US
side there has been a recent surge in the
number of “body carriers” caught at the
border — those who conceal the pills in
packets that are often stuffed into their
rectal or vaginal cavities.
“ALMOST EVERYONE
KNOWS SOMEONE
WHO HAS DIED OF
FENTANYL,” SAYS
MICHELLE, A
GRIEVING MOTHER.
THIS IS NOT AN
EXAGGERATION
A patchwork of solutions
The US response to the crisis has so far
varied across states, cities and counties. In
California, where fentanyl claimed more
than 7,300 lives in 2022, prosecutors have
either begun or have announced plans to
charge dealers with murder. In the state of
Virginia, Loudoun County — a wealthy area
roughly an hour west of Washington — has
announced plans to sweep high schools
with sniffer dogs to combat rising overdose
deaths among teenagers.
At the federal level, last year the Food
and Drug Administration approved
over-the-counter sales of the overdose
reversal drug naloxone, a move that
proponents of the so-called “harm-reduction
model” have demanded for years.
Supporters of the decision say that putting
naloxone kits in as many hands as possible
will save lives. New York state has also
made naloxone available free from
vending machines.
Those calling for international action
have been encouraged by discussions
between presidents Biden and Xi Jinping at
a summit held in California last November.
National guard
officers on a
training exercise
in Manzanillo. The
police has been
heavily infiltrated
by drug cartels
On the fringes of talks about Taiwan,
Washington and Beijing presented
a joint plan to curb the flow of fentanyl
into the US, with China agreeing to do
more to pursue producers of the
precursor chemicals.
Biden praised Xi’s “commitment” on
the issue, although when pushed on how
much stock he could put in his counterpart’s
promises he fell back upon a phrase
Ronald Reagan often used when referring
to the Soviet Union’s pledges on nuclear
disarmament during the Cold War: he said
he would take a “trust, but verify” approach.
“Fentanyl is an equal opportunity
murderer,” says Michelle Leopold, the
grieving mother of Trevor in San Francisco.
“It does not discriminate.”
Only briefly does her voice crack during
our conversation — mostly she displays a
steady stoicism. She has discovered a new
purpose: making sure that as few parents
as possible have to go through what her
family has endured, by raising awareness
about the drug that killed her son.
Most weekends she can be found outside
one of her family’s hardware stores in a
purple T-shirt bearing the slogan “Overdose
awareness”. She always carries a shot of
naloxone with her and pleads with others
to do the same. When Michelle began her
mission in 2019, she says hardly anyone
listened. Now, after hundreds of thousands
of deaths, parents are waking up to the
danger. Michelle’s meetings are packed.
“Almost everybody knows somebody”
who has died from fentanyl, she says. The
statistics show that is not the exaggeration
it might seem: four out of ten Americans in
one recent survey said they knew someone
who had died from a drugs overdose.
Michelle believes that the US government
still isn’t doing enough to inform Americans
of the risks posed by fentanyl. That task,
she says, has fallen into the hands of an
“army” of devastated families. “The
education is coming from parents with
first-hand experiences,” she says. “We just
don’t want anybody else to join this horrific
club of having to bury your own child.” n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 19