Cartels Are Using Pharmacies To Sell Fake Pills Laced With Fentanyl and Meth to Unwitting Tourists
Tourists can buy opioids and benzos in Mexico without prescriptions. Many of the pills are fake and laced with fentanyl and meth, a Vice News investigation with the Bunk Police shows. The Sinaloa and New Generation Jalisco Cartels in Mexico are using fake pills laced with Fentanyl and Meth to sell to unsuspecting American tourists. The purchase of any opioids or benzos requires a special prescription issued by Mexico’s Health Ministry, and sales staff had fished out of bottles marked with fake labels and clear plastic bags containing loose pills. The DEA has warned that counterfeit pills are “one of the greatest threats to the health of Americans and their safety of Americans today.” Last year, nearly 110,000 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. from synthetic opioids from them, and the DEA seized more than double the double amount of fentanyl-laced pills in the United States.
Published : 2 years ago by Deborah Bonello, Josh Visser, Max Daly in Health
“Do you have Xanax?” we asked the shop assistant in Cabo. But he had been tipped off that we’d been asking for pills all around town. “They’ll chop your head off,” the salesman blurted out as we left the shop.
“What did you say?” we asked. “Nothing,” he shrugged, looking off into the distance. “I didn’t say nothing.” He was likely speaking on behalf of the producers of the groups behind the pills being sold through Mexico’s pharmacies to unsuspecting American tourists: the Sinaloa and New Generation Jalisco Cartels. When we tested the fake “Oxycodone”, “Hydrocodone” or “Percocet”, as well as pills mimicking Adderall, using Bunk Police test kits back at our hotel, our suspicions were confirmed. Of four fake Oxys we tested, two tested positive for fentanyl. Of six fake Adderall’s we tested, four tested positive for meth. Sales staff had fished those pills out of bottles marked with fake labels, as well as from clear plastic bags containing loose pills. Technically, the purchase of any opioids or benzos requires a special prescription issued by Mexico’s Health Ministry, according to the Federal Health Law. We saw this law flouted across the coast —only the major pharmacy chains refused to sell us the pills without a prescription.
None of the nine “Adderall” pills we purchased in Mexican pharmacies without prescriptions were genuine. Six tested positive for meth, and two of them contained an unidentifiable substance. One “Adderall” sample contained Aminorex, which was removed from the U.S. market in 1972 due to it causing pulmonary hypertension.
Our findings are backed by other reporting on the U.S-Mexico border as well as a recent UCLA study. Tiny amounts of fentanyl can kill, especially those not expecting to consume the drug or those with a low tolerance for opioids. A number of cases in which pills bought by Americans in Mexico and taken home have caused fatal overdoses have been documented in the U.S. “These aren’t meds - these are falsified products,” said Xavier Tello, an independent health policy analyst, author and former trauma surgeon. “Organized crime is selling its substances disguised as medications which—even if they were genuine—would still be illegal for sale in Mexico.” Many of the fentanyl-tainted pills came from bottles labeled entirely in English with the words “Percocet” and “Painkillers Tablets Hydrocodone.”
“It’s an elaborate hoax,” said Ben Westhoff, author of Fentanyl Inc. “Somebody went to the trouble of trying to imitate what they think prescription pills bottles are supposed to look like to a U.S consumer, and although they missed the mark by a lot these bottles do have half an air of legitimacy and certainly a lot more than handing someone a baggie of pills.” Mexico’s hyper-violent drug-trafficking organizations have infiltrated the country’s independent pharmacies with almost no government intervention, despite health warnings from the U.S State Department about the proliferation of poisonous pills across the country. “Exercise caution when purchasing medication in Mexico,” warns a travel alert published earlier this year. “These pills are sometimes represented as OxyContin, Percocet, Xanax and others, and may contain deadly doses of fentanyl,” the U.S State Department warned Reporting by VICE News showed that small, licensed pharmacies as well as tourist stores with no legal permit to distribute such medications are selling these pills to tourists without prescriptions. Many of the pills bought in Mexico during reporting for this article looked clearly fake, and crumbled under the slightest pressure between two fingers. “U.S. citizens have become seriously ill or died in Mexico after using synthetic drugs or adulterated prescription pills,” warned another U.S State Department travel alert in March.
A DEA spokesperson told VICE News that counterfeit pills are “one of the greatest threats to the safety and health of Americans today.” Last year, nearly 110,000 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S, 75,000 of them from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. In 2022, the DEA seized more than double the amount of fentanyl-laced, fake prescription pills in the U.S than it seized in 2021. “The only safe medications are ones prescribed directly to you by a trusted medical professional and dispensed by a licensed pharmacist,” said the DEA spokesperson But most Americans are likely unaware that the pills they’re buying are fake – never mind contain illegal drugs such as fentanyl and meth. “I don’t think Americans realize that their life could be on the line purchasing something from here. I think people trust pharmacies to keep them safe and I want Americans traveling in Mexico to know that pharmacies in Mexico are not safe,” said Adam Auctor, the founder of the Bunk Police, which functions as a harm reduction organization through the research, manufacture, and distribution of substance test kits. “There are several different types of people being affected by this. There is a very large number of older American expats that are living in Mexico to take advantage of the lower cost of living and they do trust the medical system and these pharmacies. I think they are a large customer base for these pharmacies. Beyond that, there are people who take this back to the U.S. for themselves and there are a large number of people who take it back for their relatives and their children. “Adderall” is used to treat ADHD and I am certain that American children are being given meth-tainted “Adderall” bought in from Mexico,” said Auctor.
“The kind of pills that are turning up in busts in the U.S. pretty much exactly match the pills you turned up in your investigation, so to me it seems likely that all these pills are coming from the same place,” said Westhoff. Los Chapitos Ask the DEA to Just Leave Them Alone The sun-drenched town of Tulum in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo is smaller and has more of a hippy feel to it than Los Cabos in the north. Some of its roads are unpaved, but the main street going through the town hosts more than two dozen pharmacies, some chain stores and others independent. Many of them have signs outside that say “drugstore” in English, and list the painkillers and tranquilizers that they have for sale outside, as well as on menus standing on counters inside, which list names of meds in English such as Percodan, Xanax, and Clonazepam. Other sellers are small counters placed in shops otherwise selling tourist tat such as sandals and clothes.
Neither of those types of establishments asked us for a prescription to buy either opioid or benzo pills. But the very first pharmacy we entered on arriving in the town sold us two “Oxys” and two “Adderall” pills – all of which later tested positive for fentanyl and meth respectively. On the wall hung a government pharmacy license. An hour’s drive away in Playa Del Carmen, drug dealers beckoned us off the main tourist strip at night, which is lined with restaurants, ice-cream shops and bars, to offer us cocaine and weed. “Got any Oxys?” I asked one of them, who was short and squat, and insisted he was a “dealer not a stealer.” Sure, he said, and led me next door to the nearest pharmacy which had bottles of 10 “Percocets” on offer, without prescription, for a couple hundred dollars. “What do they do? How do they feel?” asked the dealer, who said that he was seeing people ask for the pills more and more.
Down a quiet street a few blocks from where we bought the bottles, another dealer gestured to us, again offering us weed and cocaine. My companion was a young, blue-eyed, blonde haired American–the archetype of their typical client, I conclude. The dealer, who is short and wearing a Mexican World Cup football shirt, placed a small tray of cocaine wraps under my nose when we got to the counter inside a small narrow shop that’s selling chip packets and not much else. He urges me to sniff the coke to understand the quality– it smells of gasoline. I asked him for “Xanax” or “Oxy” pills, and his friend–who looked as though he had seen better days–disappeared out the back door into a yard scattered with junk. He reappeared with a bottle of “Percocets”, and offered to sell us two pills each at $5 bucks a pop. ‘I'm Back In Withdrawal’: Methadone Shortage Is Hitting Opioid Users Hard in Mexico It’s not hard to go around the bureaucracy designed to regulate Mexico’s pharmaceutical ecosystem. Some of the pharmacies selling the adulterated pills had the necessary government license - issued by the federal agency known by its acronym COFEPRIS that is charged with regulating the country’s pharmacies - framed and on display on the walls. Others had no such documentation. But both types of pharmacies sold us the cartel-made, opioid painkillers adulterated with fentanyl without prescriptions, as well as fake Adderall meds adulterated with meth. Many of those pharmacies offered to sell us pills in the thousands. Some stores said we could purchase as many as we wanted.
A Horrifying Drug Called ‘Tranq Dope’ Is Spreading in the US But the biggest factor contributing to the fact that agents aren’t closing down shops and pharmacies selling these fake, potentially deadly, pills is likely fear of the repercussions for doing so. The role of organized crime in producing, packaging and distributing these pills around Mexico brings with it the threat of violence, as VICE News and the Bunk Police experienced first hand during the reporting of this story. Closing down “pharmacies”, legal or not, interferes with cartel profits and brings consequences. Tulum, Playa Del Carmen (or Playa del Crimen as it is now often referred to), Cancun, Los Cabos and Tijuana have for years been convulsed by drug-related violence which many locals have seen up close, and if not, on local media. “It’s not that every single pharmacy is controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel or Jalisco, but the extent of the sales across so many parts of Mexico of these pills, and the ease with which they can be obtained, means this is now a major strategy for the cartels,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC.
“It also creates an augmented threat to public health.” It’s likely that Americans are dying in Mexico from overdoses caused by these pills, but the lack of accurate registration of drug overdoses makes it hard to know. Mexico’s forensics system is overwhelmed by the country’s murder rate - bodies pile up at the morgue and toxicology reports determining drug deaths are rare. When drug overdoses occur, they are usually not registered as such on death certificates - opioid overdoses on the border tend to be registered as respiratory failure, according to Alfonso Chavez from the harm reduction center PrevenCasa in Tijuana that works with fentanyl users.
Topics: Methamphetamine