A former heroin laboratory sits abandoned in Filo de Caballos, Mexico in this undated photo. Demand dropped due to synthetics. (Credit: Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Melissa and Daryl McKinsey first heard about “Mexican Oxy” last year when their 19-year-old son Parker called in tears.
“I need to go to rehab,” he said.
Several months earlier, a friend had given Parker a baby-blue pill that was stamped on one side with the letter M.
It resembled a well-known brand of oxycodone, the prescription painkiller that sparked the American opioid epidemic.
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A graph shows the number of U.S. deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids from 1999 to 2018. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)
