reconnaissance mis-
sion, sleuthing through
online ads and forum
postings, many of
which linked back to a
saleswoman in China who went by the name Li
Li. Posing as a prospective buyer, Buemi reached
out to Li Li and, after a few weeks, had learned
enough to begin mapping out the network of
American distributors.
For Buemi, the China connection was hardly
a surprise. According to the State Department,
China has between 160,000 and 400,000 chemical
companies operating legally, illegally or some-
where in between — an expansive estimate that
refl ects both the vastness of the industry and
the scarcity of the information available. Some
of these facilities manufacture tons of chemicals
every week, or more than a million pills per day.
In 2016, the industry made up 3 percent of China’s
national economy, with over $100 billion in profi ts
annually. Most of these companies are members
of the vast pharmaceutical underclass, pumping
out huge quantities of inexpensive generic drugs
and pharmaceutical ingredients. It’s a low-cost,
low-profi t business, but the barriers to entry are
minimal, and the market is immense: The basic
pharmaceutical ingredients that China produces
are needed by more advanced drug companies
everywhere in the world —
including the United States
— for synthesis into more
complex and profitable
medicines.
The agency responsible
for overseeing production
of drugs and detecting
malfeasance in China is
understaffed and over-
whelmed: As of 2017, there
were around 2,000 inspec-
tors at the agency, and
they conducted a total of
only 751 inspections that
year, a minuscule fi gure
compared with the enor-
mousness of the industry.
In the United States, law
enforcement and prosecu-
tors have the tools to react
quickly to the rise of new
copycat drugs that could
be used for illicit purposes.
Under the Controlled Sub-
stance Analogue Enforce-
ment Act, passed in 1986,
any new compound that is
‘‘substantially similar’’ to an
already banned, or sched-
uled, drug can be treated as
if it were chemically identi-
cal. But chemicals banned
in the United States often remain legal in China,
where the process for controlling chemicals is
slow and cumbersome, especially for substances
like fentanyl that exist in the purgatory between
legitimate pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs.
The scale of the problem was enough to over-
whelm entire agencies, much less one investiga-
tor like Buemi. Yet his contact with Li Li off ered
a starting point. Looking through the catalog
of drugs on off er, Buemi saw Molly — but he
also saw pills containing a mix of oxycodone
and something called acetyl fentanyl, dyed and
pressed to look like legitimate prescription pain
pills. Buemi had a hunch that the same drug ring
responsible for moving Molly into South Florida
might also be importing the acetyl fentanyl pills.
He placed an order for both.
Li Li took an interest in her new customer.
Apparently hoping to groom Buemi as an Ameri-
can distributor, she shared with him the name
and telephone number of a man in the North-
eastern United States who distributed the com-
pany’s drugs across the country. ‘‘Reach out to
him,’’ Buemi recalls Li Li saying. ‘‘He’ll tell you
everything about us.’’
On their fi rst call, almost before Buemi could
introduce himself, the distributor leapt into a
long, feverish recap of a lifetime of illicit activ-
ities. All he wanted to do was talk about drugs.The distributor said that he had been caught once
by the D.E.A., but that he had learned his lesson.
Now he was more careful.
Buemi had by then received the acetyl fen-
tanyl pills from Li Li: 50 of them, fi ve strips of
10 wrapped neatly in paper, tucked inside a let-
ter-size Canada Post envelope. He was doing his
own research on fentanyl, but still didn’t real-
ly understand what it was or why it was being
shipped to the United States as a street drug. On
the call, the distributor brought it up unprompted.
‘‘Have you ever heard of fentanyl?’’ the dis-
tributor asked. He walked Buemi through the
basics: Just sprinkle fentanyl into heroin or
a batch of counterfeit prescription pills, and
the potency — and the street value — increases
enormously. Unlike heroin, cocaine or marijua-
na, the distributor explained, fentanyl didn’t
require farmland, crops, sunshine, rain or fi eld
hands. It was made in a lab and was easy to
synthesize from a few ingredients. Cheap, high-
ly addictive and easy to move, fentanyl was a
drug traffi cker’s dream. It was also deadly. The
distributor told Buemi that he had put some of
a heroin-fentanyl mixture into a friend’s needle.
Almost as soon as his friend injected, the man
overdosed and died. It was the friend’s fault,
the distributor added — he had been drunk and
high when he took it.
Buemi knew that the danger of the drug
would not deter traffi ckers — there was sim-
ply too much money to be made. A kilogram
of fentanyl, purchased for only a few thousand
dollars, can be mixed with heroin and made
into a couple million dollars’ worth of pills; by
contrast, a kilogram of undiluted heroin nets
less than $80,000 in profi t. A Ziploc bag of fen-
tanyl will pay for college, with money left over
to buy a house and car.
Fentanyl was coming, Buemi realized, and
no one was prepared for its arrival. Hoping to
raise the alarm, he took his case fi le to a local
prosecutor. But the prosecutor could see no way
to pursue a case. She couldn’t indict anyone in
China, and it wasn’t clear that the exotic new
fentanyl analogues were illegal in the fi rst place.
Buemi couldn’t let it go. There was something
odd about that package he’d received, about the
whole operation he’d uncovered. He had been
trying to buy pills from China — why were they
being shipped from Canada?
Well, Buemi thought, this is going to be an
interesting case.Fentanyl was fi rst synthesized in 1960 by Paul
Janssen, a young Belgian doctor and pharmacolo-
gist who started his own lab on the third fl oor of
the family’s pharmaceutical business. Janssen,
who eventually became one of the most prolif-
ic drug inventors of all time, making important
contributions in allergy, botanical disorders,
fungal disease, gastroenterology, immunology,35BAILEY HENKE
IN 2013.
The New York Times Magazine