American Thought Leaders - Inside the Fentanyl Supply Chain: Michael Brown

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

“Currently, there is a surplus of fentanyl pills in America. The surplus, I believe, is driving increased addiction rates, because now fentanyl pill prices are going down. Drug usage is going up. Addiction rates are going up.”In this episode, I sat down with Michael Brown, a former DEA special agent and the current director of Counter-Narcotics Technology for Rigaku Analytical Devices.The cartels are now mass producing or have the capacity to mass produce multi-ton quantities of fentanyl, which is a direct indication that they’re receiving more precursor chemicals from China,” said Brown.We dug deep into the fentanyl crisis and illicit drug trade in the United States and got an insider’s look into the narcotic supply chain, from China, to Mexico, to the southern U.S. border.“We’ve passed the point of no return in terms of reducing addiction in rate to what’s coming into the country in terms of narcotics—meaning, until we can reduce the supply chain, we’re not going to be able to reduce the addiction rate,” said Brown.But how best to reduce the supply chain? Is it merely a matter of sealing our border?“We know that 98% of all the narcotics coming into the United States are transported in vehicles—in commercial cargo that come across the United States. So, for me, the vulnerability for the cartels is that transportation cross-border network that they have,” said Brown.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Currently there is a surplus of fentanyl pills in America. The surplus, I believe, is driving increased addiction rates because now fentanyl pill prices are going down, drug usage is going up, addiction rates are going up. In this episode, I sit down with Michael Brown, a former DEA special agent and current director of Counter Narcotics Technology for Regaku Analytical Devices. The cartels are now mass-producing multi-ton quantities of fentanyl, which is a direct indication that they're receiving more precursor chemicals from China. We dig deep into the fentanyl crisis and illicit drug trade in the U.S. and get an insider's look into the narcotics supply chain from China to Mexico to the southern U.S. border.

We've passed the point of no return in terms of reducing addiction and rate to what's coming into the country in terms of narcotics. Until we can reduce the supply chain, we're not going to be able to reduce the addiction rate. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Michael Brown, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. I appreciate the Jekielek. Michael Brown, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. I appreciate the invitation. Thank you. The governor of Texas recently posted that Operation Lone Star has seized enough fentanyl, it's over 500 million lethal doses since its inception, to kill every man, woman, and child in both the U.S. and Mexico

combined. That sounds like an astonishing number and an astonishing reality. And this is your area of expertise. What's going on here? Well, I think that's just an indication. And that's just Texas. That doesn't include DEA, HSI, CBP statistics, which would be probably another 100 million pills. I think in last year DEA seized alone 77 million pills. And if we look at the intelligence we're receiving from the Mexican Navy on the precursor chemical seizures at their major ports, they've seen a tenfold increase in precursor chemicals used to make not only fentanyl but methamphetamine and heroin. So across the board, I think what we're seeing is a dramatic increase in the ability of the cartels to want to acquire the essential precursor chemicals

or dual-purpose chemicals, produce fentanyl and methamphetamine, and ship it through into the United States for nationwide distribution. Briefly tell me how the supply chain works for these precursors, from start to finish. Well, historically based, we talk about precursor chemicals for cocaine, right? Going back to the days of Pablo Escobar in the early 90s, he was getting primarily all of his acidic anhydride,

which is the primary precursor for cocaine production from China. India, to some degree, but China has always been, for the last three decades, the primary supplier of narcotic precursors to Mexican cartels. So let's just narrow it down, and we'll talk about fentanyl. China is the primary supplier of precursor chemicals for the illicit production of fentanyl in clandestine labs in Mexico, which is then shipped into the United States. And how does that translate into people's deaths?

I understand that it's something like to the tune of 70,000 a year now people are dying from fentanyl. No, actually in 2022, we saw about 84,000 people died specifically related to opioid overdoses, primarily fentanyl. That went down about 3% to about 80,000 people died specifically related to opioid overdoses, primarily fentanyl. That went down about 3% to about 80,000 in 2023. And I think that reduction across the country was related to the use of Narcan and Oxal. Now, everyone's carrying it. I don't think there's been a reduction in overdoses,

but there's been a reduction in overdose fatalities primarily due to everyone having Narcan. But again, to what Governor Abbott has demonstrated is that the cartels are now mass producing or have the capacity to mass produce multi-ton quantities of fentanyl, which is a direct indication that they're receiving more precursor chemicals from China to initiate that process. And that is a significant problem. What does fentanyl look like? You know, micro doses of fentanyl can be lethal.

And this is, you know, part of the reason, I think, that it makes it difficult to track it and so forth. But how does, you know, you've been in on fentanyl busts and so forth. Like, what does that look like? Well, fentanyl, I retired from DEA after 32 years of service in 2020. And, of course, at that time, fentanyl was just coming on the scene around 2012, 2018, which time I was the DEA country attache in Miramar dealing with methamphetamine. So fast forward to now, I recently retired and now I'm looking at the fentanyl situation. And of course, if you know, anyone who has a sweetener, a sugar sweetener,

if you open it up and you see that white powder, that's what fentanyl looks like, right? But fentanyl is a hundred times more powerful than morphine, 50 times more powerful than heroin. And everybody's seen that pencil with a little bit of fentanyl on the tip saying this is most likely a milligram and a half to two milligrams is enough to kill a full grown adult in roughly 30 minutes. So we're talking about an extremely powerful synthetic opioid that is now being distributed

across the country. It's sourced in Mexico, distributed by domestic trafficking groups that accounts for 80 to 84,000 overdose deaths a year. A typical, well, let's see, a fentanyl bust at the border. Like, are you getting a truck of fentanyl? Are you getting, you know, someone who had a baggie in their pocket? Like, what does that look like? Well, the easiest way to transport fentanyl is in the pill form. So you'll see a number of seizures made by Customs and Border Protection. There'll be a false compartment in a car, and they'll pull out six or seven kilo-sized bags,

each having maybe 100,000 to 200,000 fentanyl pills in it, right? And DEA, according to DEA, seven out of ten of those pills has a lethal dose of at least two milligrams of fentanyl. So it comes across the border in the pills. Those pills are then distributed across to domestic trafficking groups throughout the United States, and then they're sold. And then people who are either taking those pills, thinking there's something else, like an Adderall or a Percocet or an Oxycontin, and it's actually a fentanyl pill, and they die. Or there's long-term substance users. They buy those pills, they grind them up, and they smoke them or they inject them,

and depending on the amount of fentanyl, it can produce an overdose action or extend their long-term addiction. So either or, you're looking at a very serious substance use problem in our country. And there's also these adulterants, like basically things like that create this, you know, I guess what's called on the street the zombie drug. You see these pictures of people, you know, basically looking like zombies. Tell me a little bit about how that works. Typically with any pure narcotics, for example when I was on the job, traffickers would buy a kilogram of cocaine or heroin and they would cut it,

the street term is cut it, with an adulterant, at that time milk sugar or laxative, some non-toxic substance to increase the quantity, reducing the potency of cocaine, say, from 99% to 1 or 2%. And they could sell more and then, of course, make more money. Now, with fentanyl, some trafficker came up with an idea that let's take the most powerful synthetic opioid on the market and let's cut it with another powerful opioid-based sedative, such as xylosine or we're seeing the natazines these are all very powerful sedatives that are being cut into fentanyl to one increase the dosage amount right you so now you have more and then it also increases the

the potency so as dangerous as fentanyl was then you put some xylosine in the fentanyl that increases or extends what some xylizine in the fentanyl. That increases or extends what I call the high, right, the effect of using the substance. So instead of a 30-minute high with a gram, a milligram of fentanyl, you put some xylizine in it and now the user can experience maybe an hour to two hours of intoxication, right. So for users that's what they're looking for, looking for that extended high. But of course, with xylosine, it causes extreme necrosis, and that's rotting of the flesh

around the injection points or in other areas of the body. So that's causing a secondary medical issue that's spreading across the country. But due to the addiction qualities, users are ignoring the necrosis effect in order to continue using the narcotics. So the adulterants now present a more difficult problem because many adulterants do not respond to Narcan. So if an individual is using fentanyl that has xylosine in it and they overdose and you apply the Narcan, it doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to revive that individual. So xylosine and these other very dangerous adulterants complicate the revival process if someone does into an

overdose based on fentanyl usage. So, you know, you typically think of what has been described as these kind of open-air injection sites in cities that are, of drug use or have these, what I would describe as extreme harm reduction or something like that, policies. You can see drug use there. You see these people that are on the so-called zombie drug, sort of pulling out their highs. But you mentioned something else earlier, which was people who accidentally take fentanyl thinking they're taking Adderall. But how does that work? I mean, Adderall is a prescription drug.

Well, you know, you have to look at America has a very large percentage of the population that are addicted to prescription drugs, right? We go back to Purdue Pharma and OxyContin. Prescription drug, highly addictive, led to the current opioid addiction. People got addicted to Oxycontin, then switched to heroin, and then switched to fentanyl. So you can track the progression from prescription drugs. Now, for example, on my podcast, The Opioid Matrix, I've had a lot of parents on the podcast who had fantastic children. One young lady, she had a son in college. He was an all-star athlete on his way to the majors, and he took an Adderall from a friend, and it turned out to be fentanyl.

She goes in in the morning, and he's dead. usage but do have an addiction or a tendency to use prescription drugs, Oxycontin, Valiums and other such medications that are sold illegally, right, but that are not necessarily an addictive situation. And then that paradigm of drug user is increasing, well not drug user, but that paradigm of overdoses that lead to fatalities is increasing. So that's a different paradigm than when we think of the individual on the street who's been a long-term substance user. Michael, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back. And we're back with Michael Brown,

Director of Counterdrug Technology for Rogaku analytical devices. But basically these are people who, you know, go because the doctor is no longer going to give them the prescription that they've been getting. I mean, I'm trying to understand how this works, right? So then they go on the street because they still need to get that drug or they feel they need it. With Adderall, it's even people use it for studying and this kind of thing. How big is that market of these kind of street prescription drugs? Well, the illicit prescription drug situation is enormous. I mean, it's something we really never hear about. But even in DEA, we had a number of investigations which were targeting doctors and pharmacies who were selling illegal scripts.

There was a point in time where you could go in and you could purchase a prescription pad. I'm going back a number of years where you'd have to fill out and falsify the information, take it to a pharmacy. The pharmacy, knowing that it was fake, would still issue the prescription, let's say for OxyContin or for Valium. That was a big drug that was abused. So for years we have a huge population of individuals who are addicted to prescription drugs. Then suddenly there's a crackdown after Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma. Doctors are now, hey, I'm only going to give you six pills. Well, six isn't enough because the prior with you were getting 36. So now your six is out, so now you're like, you're turning to your street dealer, your heroin dealer. He's like, I can take care of you.

And then the heroin substitutes that prescription addiction. But then unbeknownst to the user, within that heroin's a little bit of fentanyl. And then the user gets addicted to the fentanyl. And now the user is buying pure fentanyl and either cutting it himself or taking the risk that it's not a lethal portion and ingesting it. Then once you cross the line into the illicit market, the traffickers know you have an addiction

issue. So they will slowly move you from prescription legal drugs or legal distribution to hard narcotics. And they know once you hit heroin, it's a very short path to fentanyl. And so, you know, basically you're being given something that you think is a weaker drug but it's been adulterated with this stronger drug and then you get hooked. That's the model? If you were using Valium and suddenly your prescription is cut off, you're going to go

to someone who says they're selling real Valium pills and they'll have a pill that looks like Valium, same stamp, same numbers, everything, but it will be fentanyl. So the individual is taking something they have no idea what it really is, but they're trusting their best friend, their doctor or their distributor that what they're giving them is actually Valium. And they might, the seller may not even know because he bought it from somebody else. Right. Right? So along that supply chain, it touches a lot of hands.

But by the time it gets to the user's hand, they're just taking the chance that it's a real value. And from the perspective of the people that are, I guess, at the higher level dealing the fentanyl, once people are hooked, they're hooked and whatever method you can get them hooked, that's great. That's the whole concept of drug trafficking, right? They know they're selling an incredibly addictive substance that you don't have to resell. Once an individual becomes addicted, it sells itself. The addiction keeps them in business. So here's the thing that I find bizarre. I mean, there's this, I guess, adage from a long time ago that I have in my mind

that, you know, the reason you didn't want to make a drug too strong that was being trafficked, right, is because someone that's dead doesn't make a good client for the trafficker, so to speak. But with fentanyl, that seems to be broken. Why is it acceptable now for people to be dying in these large numbers from the perspective of the trafficker? I get asked that question, the most frequent question I ever get asked is, why do drug dealers want to kill their clients? Well, they're not intentionally setting out to kill their clients. You know, I go back to my time in Detroit when I was working a heroin investigation. It was a particular organization who put out a bad batch of heroin. It was cut with, I don't know if it was rat poison, but it was cut with some toxic substance

that killed 10 or 15 people immediately. I mean, it was a very violent death, right? When you ingest, imagine ingesting sodium cyanide or arsenic, right? It's not a pleasant way to die. So when that heroin came out and people died, everybody backed away, users backed away, they stopped buying, the police came down hard on the trafficking organizations. And it kind of, it was kind of common knowledge, you were a drug trafficker, you don't want to sell something that's going to intentionally kill your clients, because one, it's bad for business, you reduce sales, and two, the police are going to come after you, right? So that was the market paradigm for many years.

So then we move into fentanyl, and they saw a number of people dying, but not dying in a violent way. They just go into a high, they pass out, cardiac arrest, and they die. But what the cartel saw that even though people were dying, sales continued to increase. Substance users continued to buy it thinking that fentanyl presented the ultimate high because it brought you very close to that near-death experience. So the cartels noticed that at the end of, let's say, 2022, 84,000 people died,

but still sales were increasing. And we know sales are increasing because Mexico is seizing more precursor chemicals right China is selling more chemicals which means they're producing more fentanyl and distributing it into the United States even though we've seen a 3% decrease in overdose fatalities not overdoses but overdose fatalities over the last year. I want to talk a little bit about how these cartels work, because often we think of cartel and we think of a kind of, you know, sort of a gang, you know, somewhat disorganized group of people. These are highly sophisticated operations. I mean, effectively working like corporations, just in a much more illicit way in many cases.

Before I get you to tell me about that, tell me a little bit about your background. You mentioned you have 30 years in law enforcement and in the DEA and just kind of a bigger picture of how you come to know so much about these things. After college, I graduated in 1984 and then graduated from DEA in 1989 at the academy. And then immediately upon joining DEA, I joined a special operations group called Snowcap. And this was a series of agents who had to go to U.S. Army Ranger School, be certified in special operations to go work counter-drug interdiction Central and South America. So I was deployed. I worked in Bolivia with Bolivian Special Forces.

And basically our groups went out into the jungles and we went after drug traffickers, drug transportation routes, planes, cocaine clandestine laboratories and such. I did that for about four or five years, transferred to Central America where I worked in Guatemala and Honduras for a number of years, and then I worked domestically in the United States in Detroit for about 10 years. But then, you know, having worked overseas, I saw the ability to really have boots on the ground, hands on effect, to significantly mitigate the capability of trafficking groups to function. So I gravitated more towards the overseas foreign environment.

So from Detroit, I spent another 10 years in Pakistan, Afghanistan, working with law enforcement in that region. And then I spent a number of years in India and Myanmar, again, working larger transnational criminal organizations, trying to mitigate their ability to produce and ship narcotics to the United States as well as the rest of the world. Then I spent a few years in headquarters, the headquarters working transnational organized crime groups, focusing on the fentanyl situation, and then retired in 2020, and then took a job with a company called Regaku Analytical Devices

as a business manager development and the director of counter narcotics technology. Regaku, they make what's called Raman spectroscopy laser hand units which can identify unknown substances, narcotics, precursor chemicals, explosives. The kind of thing you see in the procedurals, the VB procedurals being used, right? Right, exactly, the latest technology

in drug identification. Right. You've told me offline that you have a friend who was deep in the Sinaloa cartel and ended up becoming someone who was kind of turning the tables on them. Right. It's actually an individual I met recently back in the 2000-2001 time period. He was based in Chicago. He and his brother were the main distributors for the Sinaloa cartel. They were moving upwards to 10 to 20 metric tons of cocaine a month that they were receiving from the Sinaloa Cartel. They were moving upwards to 10 to 20 metric tons of cocaine a month

that they were receiving from the Sinaloa Cartel. And over a number of years, he was making an estimated between $4 and $12 million a month, right? Significant amount of money. And he was just a large wholesaler. He would get from the Sinaloa Cartel, and then he'd resell it to local distributors who would then ship it across the United States. Of course, then came a time where he came into the radar of law enforcement, turned himself in, became a cooperating witness, did about 12 years in federal penitentiary, and now he's training and consulting with law enforcement on how to understand the methodology on how cartels work. So, you know, in talking to him, he gave me great insight, you know, on how the cartels work. So in talking to him, he gave me great insight in how the cartels

operate. He says, you know, think about any large Fortune 500 company. But the cartels or Fortune 2 company, right, Sinaloa and CJ&G represent the two most profitable corporations in the world in terms of capability, profit, distribution, money laundering. These are very complicated organizations that are involved in legitimate as well as illegitimate businesses. They have lawyers, they have chemists, they have transportation experts, they have accountants. They're also associated with the Chinese money laundering organizations. So they are, in every sense, utilizing a modern business model to flood America with a substance that's killing roughly 100,000 people a year. But you mentioned that they're also involved in all sorts of legitimate enterprise. If we look at the history of the Italian mafia, initially they weren't drug dealers at all.

They were into extortion. They were into construction, garbage collection, all sorts of legitimate businesses based on their illicit businesses, right? So you make a lot of money from extortion, blackmail, narcotics, murder, and then you invest it into a legitimate business, right? Look at the Teamsters back in the day, right? Controlled by the mafia. The cartels are no different. They're in the avocado business. They're in a tequila business, they're in construction, they're in the entertainment, they're in the resort, they own part of Acapulco. So they're divesting, they're like we're making a lot of money but let's control everything, let's control

all the markets and we'll get a piece of everything coming in which will increase our fortune, our profit portfolio. So again, they're thinking like a structured Fortune 500 business company, divesting, bringing in additional resources, which gets funneled into narcotics, human trafficking. You and I were talking about the organ trade, right? The cartels are in that a little bit. They're into the sex trade, right? Children are disappearing. People are disappearing in Mexico every day. Where are they going? There's no accountability whatsoever. So the cartels, I mean, people just think narcotics, but we have to think in a broader sense if we really want to understand how they operate and what is it going to take to mitigate the threat they represent to the United States.

Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Michael. Any final thoughts as we finish? Increase our education awareness and make sure we're hitting those states which are experiencing higher than usual overdose fatality rates related primarily to fentanyl usage. Well, Michael Brown, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you all for joining Michael Brown and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.