The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has identified the Sinaloa and Jalisco drug cartels as the main sources of deadly fentanyl in the US.
“Chefs” making synthetic fentanyl in Mexico – Photo: Peniley Ramirez/Univision

Just a few days in the mountains are enough for me to produce 1 million fentanyl pills.

They transport fake fentanyl by truck and car across the Mexican border to the US, then sell it through social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. Polish investigative journalist Szymon Opryszek (38 years old) decided to go to Mexico to answer the question: “How is Fentanyl produced?”.

“Producing fentanyl is easier than cooking caldo soup”
In a series of articles published in the Warsaw-based investigative news site OKO.press, Szymon Opryszek said that after unsuccessfully trying to establish contacts with Mexican drug gangs, he turned to Miguel Angel Vega, a notorious lobbyist in Mexican organized crime.

At Vega’s suggestion, he traveled to Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state, to meet a “cocinero” (cook), slang for someone who makes illegal fentanyl in Mexico.

“Cocinero” Chucho waited for Opryszek at a grocery store on the outskirts of Culiacán. Chucho dropped out of school as a child and became a spy for the Sinaloa cartel. He carefully checked his passport.

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Opryszek explained that several months ago, during a trip to Tijuana, Mexico, to write about the Sinaloa cartel smuggling migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia into the United States, several sources told him that Mexican cartels had struck a deal with the Balkan mafia to smuggle counterfeit fentanyl pills into Eastern Europe, so he wanted to learn more about fentanyl.

Chucho wiped his hands on his dirty overalls and said with certainty: “Producing fentanyl is easier than cooking caldo” (a famous “caldo de res” soup in Culiacán consisting of beef bones cooked with potatoes, chayote, pumpkin and corn).

In 2022, he spent $1,000 on a Chinese pill press to produce powdered and pill-shaped fentanyl that has been used on American streets under names such as China Blanca, Apache, Dance Fever, He-Man, Ivory King.

There are at least a dozen gangs in Mexico that produce fentanyl, the most powerful being the Sinaloa and Jalisco gangs. The US website InSight Crime estimates that Mexican synthetic drug makers produce up to 4.5 tons of pure fentanyl each year for the US market alone. They squeeze fake fentanyl into pills that look like prescription painkillers and then stamp them with M30 (the weight of the pill) and sell them on the market. Patients have no idea that the fake M30 pills contain illegal fentanyl.

Chucho explained that the fake fentanyl pills are dyed yellow, pink or blue for marketing purposes because women usually like yellow and men like pink. He said that before he got the call to go to the fentanyl lab in the mountains, he had to stop by the store to get 2-3 liters of milk to take with him.

“The stench in the brewery makes me want to vomit,” he explained. “I have had colleagues who go into the kitchen without masks and end up as drug-addicted zombies or get burned because they wear short-sleeved shirts instead of full-clothes while brewing. For the past seven years, I’ve been healthy thanks to milk.”