Fentanyl, a New Top Killer in the U.S., Is Remaking the Mexican Drug Trade

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.

Read the full story on LATimes.com.

A graph shows the number of U.S. deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids from 1999 to 2018. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

Fentanyl is killing record numbers of Americans — changing life in Mexico, too.

I traveled to Guerrero, where poppy farmers are going broke, to Sinaloa, where it’s boom-times for traffickers, and to Arizona, where it took the life of an incredible kid. https://t.co/YnpzywrW12

— Kate Linthicum (@katelinthicum) September 1, 2019

“I’m the least proud of sending that drug,” a Mexican drug trafficker said of fentanyl. At least with marijuana, “I knew it wasn’t going to kill anybody.” Fentanyl is the perfect drug for Mexico’s traffickers — and a new top killer in the US https://t.co/TjQjIVotWj @katelinthicum

— Hailey Branson-Potts (@haileybranson) September 1, 2019