Fentanyl-related overdose deaths also registered a new high in 2019, at more than 37,000. Arming bar staff with a revival drug called naloxone and training them in the use of branded resuscitation medications such as the nasal spray Narcan is now standard protocol in the North American service industry.

The vast majority of these “precursor” chemicals used in the creation of fentanyl, commonly assigned Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) numbers such as 40064-34-4 – useful for purposes both legal and otherwise – are a product of China’s massive and poorly regulated chemical industry. Despite supply chain disruptions during China’s Covid-19 lockdown early last year, the availability of synthetic opioids appears to be rising again, as Mexican cartels invest heavily in manufacturing fentanyl using precursors provided by Chinese chemical companies. This is big business for all concerned.

US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spokesman Michael Miller says it would be difficult to assess the cost of producing a single pill. Before the Chinese government cracked down on the practice, necessitating a cat-and-mouse approach to precursor production, he says, “traffickers could typically purchase a kilogram of fentanyl powder for a few thousand dollars from a Chinese supplier, transform it into hundreds of thousands of pills, and sell the counterfeit pills for millions of dollars in profit. If a particular batch has 2 milligrams of fentanyl per pill, approximately 500,000 counterfeit pills can be manufactured from 1 kilogram of pure fentanyl”.

Depending on the purity and dosage, the DEA says the price per pill ranges from US$5 to US$20. To get as high on fentanyl as an addict would have previously done on heroin, a few pills, or less than US$100, would be required, whereas on the streets – according to the most recent data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) – heroin costs an addict about US$307 a gram. Opting for the fentanyl bargain was always going to be a fatal trade-off.

Used in prescription pain medicine, and together with other medications as a potent anaesthesia, fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine.

Illegal recreational use has become a scourge that cuts across class, race and status, largely owing to opioids having been overprescribed in the US over the past two decades. Up to 75 per cent of US heroin users who began using in the 2000s got their first taste with prescription opioids given for the treatment of chronic pain and other conditions. Once off prescription drugs, still addicted, they sought alternative sources. One of the most popular, and cheapest, being fentanyl.

For nearly a year, Post Magazine, in partnership with The Cartel Project, coordinated by the Paris-based non-profit group Forbidden Stories, tracked dozens of websites operated by several Chinese chemical companies to advertise fentanyl precursors, which would be shipped to Mexico.

One company stood out for its blasé advertising of those chemicals on around a dozen foreign e-commerce and social media sites. The investigation for this story disrupted the company’s advertising of those precursor chemicals, causing them to take down or alter the websites after being confronted. The com­pany also had what appeared to be deep connections to an Indian partner busted for making fentanyl at the end of 2018, although the extent of those connections remains unclear.

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Fighting fentanyl: the drug from China destroying American lives

Fighting fentanyl: the drug from China destroying American lives

Producing these precursor chemicals is not illegal in China, and by using foreign-based websites not registered in the country, a company advertising fentanyl precursors can create plausible deniability in the eyes of Chinese authorities on the lookout for “fentanyl-like” substances as the increasingly global drug crisis continues to rage.

These sites, appearing to originate in places such as Belgium, the Netherlands and India, direct customers to China-based phone numbers, social media accounts and email addresses directly tied to a company, its employees and offices. Since it has not technically committed a legal offence in the eyes of Chinese and other authorities, we will refer to one of these companies by the pseudonym “Primeship”.

From China, Primeship exports the legal substance, usually to Mexico, where groups such as the infamous Sinaloa cartel process the precursor compounds with other ingredients to create fentanyl, street-ready for sale across the border in the US and Canada via the same routes used for other illicit drugs, and the same network of dealers in the cartels’ employ.

While technically legal, drug enforcement authorities in the US and Mexico are on the lookout for these chemi­cals coming from China. Sellers who claim they were employed by Primeship told the journalists posing as buyers from Mexico that the chemicals could be obscured during shipment, so as not to raise red flags on arrival in any location. The sellers also disclosed that this is a regular service they provide for other customers.

The vaunted gleaming edifice that Primeship’s company website portrayed as its headquarters turns out to be a chain-locked dance studio in the basement of a run-down shopping mall in a low-rent industrial zone near Shanghai Disneyland. A poster in the window of the dance studio advertises martial arts classes.

“Never heard of the company and I’m not sure why it is registered there,” says an instructor, answering a call to the number on the poster. “Sometimes in China a lot of companies are registered at a location, just on paper.”

The scent of stale beer wafts out from a few dive bars surrounding the dance studio on this sunny afternoon. The ground is sticky with noodles vomited there the night before. Tumbleweeds of hair blow out of a nearby barbershop. Not exactly the image of a multimillion-dollar company whose boss claims is one of China’s biggest chemical suppliers in videos on its company websites. What is real and what is veneer blurs more as the layers of Primeship are peeled back.

The registered address of another of Primeship’s companies leads to an open grassy field in an undeveloped backwater of Pudong, Shanghai’s otherwise postcard-perfect business district where a few days later, on November 12, 2020, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, would appear to commemorate the district’s 30th anniversary. There is not even a building at the site.

Another affiliated business address leads to an activity centre for the elderly above a wet market – not at all the mirrored-glass office windows that flash on its websites. At one more registered address, a woman selling skincare products on Taobao says she has never heard of the company.

Founded in Hong Kong, but apparently operating solely out of Shanghai, Primeship’s parent company lists its main products as food additives and several industrial materials and chemicals. According to its websites, Primeship counts several major multi­nationals as customers.

While Primeship’s boss, Aaron – also a pseudonym – describes his company as one of the largest chemical suppliers in China, the only physical office where its sales agents are located is just outside Pudong. Three visits to the fourth-floor office over three days in early November, however, showed no sign of Aaron.

WeChat connections with Aaron, initially accepted, were later blocked. A visit to the office found no one anchoring the reception desk. It was easy to walk right in to a room with moss-coloured partitions and a handful of employees working at keyboards. Outside in the stairwell were bags of fertiliser chemicals bound for Afghanistan. In a side room sat stacks of keg-sized blue barrels of unknown chemicals, along with lab coats, goggles and other items gathering dust.

“Aaron has been busy,” said his assistant, Wendy, when Post Magazine visited the office. He has been busy with work, with meetings, and with study for an MBA programme at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, she said.

Having declined requests for a face-to-face interview in Shanghai, Aaron agreed to a video call on November 10. Huddled with his assistant in a small whitewashed office, and with his lawyer smoking and observing from another location in a separate WeChat window, Aaron claimed to not know anything about the fentanyl precursors his company was advertising, and denied any involvement in drug production.

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“I’m not sure what you are talking about,” he said. He downplayed much of the promotional hype about the company being the largest chemical trader in China.

“Although we are a small company, we would never do any drug-related business,” he said. “[We] never did that before, and will not do it in the future because we would never attempt to make money by harming others […] we definitely won’t do that, no matter how profitable it might be.”

Aaron appears to have been making a name for himself in the big city, at least if the way he previously presented himself and the company are taken at face value. Photos of him at conferences and speaking events are sprinkled across his WeChat account and on the websites of chemical and technology conferences.

On November 23, Post Magazine again confronted Aaron, passing along a handful of URL addresses advertising precursor chemicals that can be used in the making of fentanyl, all of which led back to real phone numbers, email addresses and sales agents from his company.

One by one the URLs began either to disappear or be altered, suggesting the company controlled them.

Half of the nearly two dozen distinct sites were removed or changed within 24 hours of their being shared with Aaron, his assistant and his lawyer. The rest received similar treatment over the following three days, as did other URL addresses, knowledge of whose existence Post Magazine had not disclosed to Primeship. Some are still accessible, but a new message appears on the page: “This product is no longer available.”

While URL addresses linked to Primeship and its subsidiaries now list several products as “no longer available”, designations for chemical precursors used to make fentanyl still appear in the URL addresses themselves. These include compounds such as 4-AP, or 4-anilinopiperidine, also known by its CAS number 99918-43-1.

Those seeking such chemicals know the numbers. The degree of difficulty in synthesising fentanyl from them depends on the method employed and the precursor used, and some require more chemical training than others. But whether it’s a small-time dealer or a cartel ordering in bulk, these variables are known.

US sanctions Chinese national over suspected fentanyl trafficking

4-AP was officially designated as a Schedule I controlled substance by the DEA in May 2020. Before Post Magazine’s questions led to its removal from the websites, 4-AP was advertised via at least a dozen individually distinct URLs directing customers to the company.

A person going by the name of Jack Zhou, and whose mainland China phone number traced back to a real name, which we have decided not to disclose, wrote an email to a Cartel Project journalist explaining that he had created the sites for Primeship as part of a search engine optimisation campaign to boost hits and attract potential customers worldwide.

The same email address belonging to Zhou was also copied in messages from Mr Chen (whose full name we have also decided not to disclose), who confirmed in an email to the journalist posing as a customer from Mexico that he is employed by Primeship, and who offered to sell them known fentanyl precursors.

Despite several requests for clarification, Primeship would neither confirm nor deny Chen was an employee, but the following communications were sent to the journalist over the same days Primeship websites were being taken down.

November 23, Chen, with Zhou copied on the email: “The price for 125541-22-2 (1-N-Boc-4-(Phenylamino)piperidine) is 599 USD/kg. The quantity you need is 150kg, so the total price for 125541 22 2 is 89850 USD, it is not small order, normally only few customers needs such a large quantity, so please check, because it will cost you a lot of money, during this pandemic, you know, money is very important for you, so I suggest you check again.”

On November 24, Chen writes again, with Zhou copied: “In my last email, I have said we do not have 79009-07-3, but I checked again and again, finally I think the CAS you provided is wrong, the correct CAS I think is 79099-07-3, we can provide this.”

Asked several times whether he was an employee of Primeship, including after his message on December 2 last year confirming that he could obfuscate the contents of the package so that it could pass through Mexican customs, Chen repeatedly insisted that he was.

According to UNODC, 125541-22-2 and 79009-07-3 are both “masked” fentanyl precursors, specifically designed to disguise scheduled or controlled precursors from which fentanyl can be derived.

The chemical CAS 125541-22-2 appeared on at least 10 distinct sites controlled by Primeship, and 79099-07-3 on at least eight, before being taken down in late November following Post Magazine’s questions about the sites.

Primeship technically did nothing illegal by advertising and selling these two masked precursors. Unlike 4-AP, these are not controlled substances in either China or the US. The company did take these chemicals off its e-commerce sites later and removed all traces of them from its other foreign-registered URLs.

That does beg the question, though, if these chemicals are legal, why take the pages down?

In its most recent report on precursor control, the UNODC states: “‘masked’ precursors present a significant challenge to control measures since there is theoretically an almost infinite number of ways to ‘mask’ or disguise scheduled precursors from existing control measures.”

“Unfortunately,” said Bryce Pardo, an expert on narcotics policies and trade at the think tank RAND Corporation, “there are almost endless possibilities to circumvent these controls by creating other non-regulated precursors. The final substance is slightly altered, but its effect is the same. I’ve heard a chemist say the precursor game with fentanyl is very tricky. Eventually, if you really want to solve this, we’re going to have to ban carbon. And clearly, we can’t ban carbon.”

Markus Schläpfer, a leading expert on synthetic drugs and precursors at Forensisches Institut Zürich, under the Zürich Police in Switzerland, told Forbidden Stories journalist François Ruchti that there are an undefined number of precursors for methamphetamines and fentanyl, perhaps 100 or more. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” he said.

While some of these chemicals do have alternative uses, the only known use of 4-AP is to make fentanyl.

Primeship also advertised several other chemicals used to make fentanyl, to act as composite agents in fentanyl or to make methamphetamines. One of these is xylazine, a horse tranquilliser that is often cut into fentanyl.

“So you’ve got, in some instances, kind of legitimate companies that are abiding by all the rules and regu­lations in China,” said Pardo. “As long as they don’t create too much noise, they will continue to produce and advertise these things online [and] once it’s controlled, they move to something else, because they want to kind of stay within the bounds of the law, even though those bounds are very flexible.”

China was not the cause of America’s ongoing opioid crisis. The ready availability and persistent pushing of synthetic opioids by some within China’s chemical industry could, however, be tempered if the country’s regulations and oversight were more robust. Steps taken by the Chinese author­ities in recent years to stem the flow of fentanyl have had a significant impact, but it appears difficult for them to crack down further.

Faced with pressure from the US to rein in producers of fully finished fentanyl, China placed a blanket ban on all “fentanyl-like substances” in April 2019.

“Imposing new regulations on fentanyl-related substances was a major step by China to curb the amount of fentanyl coming into the United States from China,” said DEA spokesman Miller. “Since the imposition of the expanded regulations, there has been a decrease in fentanyl [shipped] directly to the US.”

The move, though, has led to supply chain shifts, new online advertising campaigns and the exploitation of regulatory loopholes.

A report released on November 17 by C4ADS, a Washington-based non-profit data investigation organisation, funded in part by the US and British governments, outlines how Chinese chemical and pharmaceutical companies like Primeship are adapting to use online networks and the internet to market and advertise their products.

C4ADS has created a database of synthetic-drug suppliers detailing 103 separate Chinese entities – including Primeship, which it also extensively researched – that have advertised synthetic drugs including fentanyl precursors over the past three years. The group found that many websites were removed, altered or blocked during the course of their analysis, reflecting the changes in China’s regulations.

“[Those changes] led to a noticeable shift in the types of chemicals that were overtly advertised on the internet and how such products were marketed,” the C4ADS report states, “with uncontrolled substances in particular becoming more prevalent.”

China’s National Narcotics Control Commission, the country’s anti-drug agency, responding to faxed questions, stated that after an investigation prompted by this report it had not found Primeship and its subsidiaries to be breaking any Chinese laws by advertising these precursor chemicals, nor had it found evidence that the companies produced, sold or exported precursor chemicals restricted under Chinese law.

The commission did, however, say it has warned the companies about alternative uses of those precursor chemicals: “Relevant departments have notified the two companies about the possibility of the non-listed chemical products being used by lawbreakers to make drugs, and have reminded them to step up their product management and be careful with choosing their clients so as to actively take up the social responsibility of getting rid of drugs and join the fight against drugs,” a statement said.

The commission added that since 2015 it had garnered the support of 55 companies, including leading online marketplaces, to sign anti-drug commitments and use technologies to censor or filter out drug-related or restricted chemicals on their platforms. Anything non-regulated or apparently legitimate though can bypass these safeguards.

As for URLs of foreign origin, the commission said that other countries should strengthen their own oversight “lest lawbreakers take advantage of it”.

All said, shipments of fully finished fentanyl direct from China to the US – more prevalent in the past – appear to have been greatly reduced by China’s recent bans. Instead, chemical companies and trade agents ship precursors to Mexico, where it is made into finished fentanyl. India and Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” are also growing as production hubs, according to the C4ADS report.

Falko Ernst, a Mexico-based senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, told a Cartel Project journalist in a telephone interview in late November that the cartels had well established ties with suppliers of precursor chemicals in China as far back as the 1990s and 2000s, when precursors for methamphetamines were being sourced.

“And then you already have the context into the scene in China,” said Ernst. “You know the brokers and you know who can get you those contacts. And what I heard, basically, is that the initiative [for sourcing fentanyl precursors] did come from the Mexican side in the networks I’m familiar with.”

Primeship may therefore fall into the “broker” cate­gory that C4ADS defines using the term “dropshipping”: companies describing themselves as trading agents that do not manufacture the substances they sell, but simply arrange deals with a multitude of chemical producers to get customers the product they are looking for. Those foreign websites specifically targeted people looking for certain chemicals, often with a variety of other search engine optimisation language mixed in related to fentanyl that would attract hits.

As well as obscuring its offices and its online presence, Primeship also keeps its supplier factories under close wraps.

The main factory advertised on the Primeship website, and listed as its main supplier in Shandong, might not exist at all. Photos of the facility on the website match those found on another website belonging to a Jiangsu chemical company. When pressed, employees said the information about the Shandong factory was just “promotional material”.

Officially vetted supplier factories listed in documents on the company’s e-commerce pages are obscured, with almost all identifying information kept confidential. A supplier factory in Shandong appears in the documents, but with too little detail to confirm who the factory belongs to or what Primeship actually sources from them. For those trying to track shipments in trade data, the connecting lines are cut.

Another factory – a US$10 million, 58,329-square-metre facility of 15 buildings in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, two hours’ drive south of Shanghai – is brushed off as irrelevant, although Post Magazine’s investigation discovered it was an officially certified supplier for Primeship.

“We are a trading company, the factory on the website is only used for certification and has no practical significance,” said Aaron’s assistant, Wendy. “This is only to complete certification. We do not have a factory, so we do not have the name and address of the factory.”

Although most details were confidential, com­paring photos from the certification with photos on the factory website and matching the name of the legal representative made it possible to identify the facility in Shaoxing. When called, a foreign export manager confirmed Primeship was one of their main customers.

One reason Primeship is on the radar of those tracking internet advertising of fentanyl pre­cursors, including C4ADS and drug enforcement agencies worldwide, is the Facebook page of a person operating under the alias of Alia Yang.

In her postings, Yang presented herself as an employee of Primeship, advertising fentanyl precursors such as 4-AP, the masked precursor 125541-22-2, as well as xylazine and GBL, a Schedule I controlled substance in the US.

Most of the posts were written in the first half of 2019, with Yang appearing to specifically target customers in Mexico, even adding geotags and locations such as Mexico, Guatemala and Mexico, a city in Missouri, in the US, which might catch the eye of those searching for such chemicals using search engine optimisation.

On November 5, 2020, when attempts were made to meet with Aaron in person at his office, Wendy was the only person available to speak for the company. She did not appear to understand what fentanyl was. To show her the seriousness of the allegations, Yang’s Facebook page was presented as evidence of an employee directly advertising fentanyl precursors on the platform. In fact, that’s all Yang did on her Facebook page. No pictures of dinners out with friends, no posts about movies or music. Just advertisements for chemicals, most of which can be used to make illicit drugs.

By Friday, November 6, four days before the interview with Aaron, all of Yang’s Facebook posts had been removed and evidence of the precursors scrubbed. One of the first questions raised with Aaron the following week regarded Yang’s disappeared posts.

“She has left the company,” said Aaron. “I don’t know much about her. As the boss of the company, I didn’t have much interaction with her. As for her posting ads on Facebook, many of our employees do that, too, so that’s very normal. But as for what products she put on there, I don’t usually know.”

Aaron said he had not interacted with Yang for months, and that he had neither asked her to post the ads, nor to remove them.

“It’s her personal thing,” said Aaron. “I can’t do anything to make her take it down.”

On November 11, the day after the video interview with Aaron, his assistant admitted that her boss had become angry about the Facebook ads after Post Magazine showed them to her and had contacted Yang. Wendy said he had asked Yang to remove them the previous week, this after Aaron had denied having had contact with her after she had quit.

Wendy later presented a resignation letter from Yang dated August 14, but there was no official company stamp on the document and it could not be verified as legitimate.

All attempts to reach Yang, photographed as a pretty, pale 28-year-old from Shandong (Post Magazine has decided not to disclose her real name although it was found in the investigation), through her personal email, by telephone, WeChat, Skype and other accounts have been unsuccessful. Judging by her Facebook advertisements and her appearance on Primeship websites as an avatar and in ads – most recently for China’s biggest foreign trade expo, the Canton Fair, in June 2021 – she had been chosen by the company as one of the main faces of its agents.

And while according to Aaron, Yang had left the company in August, she was still advertising herself as a Primeship employee when approached by jour­nalists posing as fentanyl precursor buyers from Mexico in late October.

While she appeared not to have access to some pre­cursors, Yang – now known as “Lucky”, but displaying her photograph and the name of Primeship under her known telephone number – did propose selling xylazine and suggested the shipment could be obscured by changing the names on the customs forms to sub­stances such as creatine, which would draw less attention from inspectors.

Before the video interview with Aaron on November 10, several Primeship websites listed the management structure chart of the company including connec­tions to a company in India now known to have been busted for producing finished fentanyl in 2018.

At the top perched parent company Primeship, below it the general manager and the executive office of the general manager. From there the chart branches into its two primary subsidiary companies. Directly below these, but with a line to the office of the general manager, is another company that does not appear in any of Primeship’s China-based registration documents: Mondiale Mercantile Pvt. Ltd.

Despite apparently occupying a central role within the company family tree, when asked about Mondiale Mercantile in the video interview, Aaron at first struggled to recall it, before saying: “Oh, I remember now! So we had an Indian client and we talked a bit but we never did any business together. That was because we thought they were an international company and could potentially help promote us in India but that was a long time ago.”

What Aaron did not appear to know was that the head of Mondiale, an Indian national named Manu Gupta, had been arrested on September 26, 2018, for producing fentanyl in Indore. Gupta was taken into custody, along with a Mexican national named Jorge Renan Solis Fernandez and an Indian chemist, Mohammad Sadiq, in a joint operation between India’s Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the US DEA. Both Gupta and Solis Fernandez remain in the district jail in Indore, awaiting trial.

There were scattered reports in the Indian media at the time, but full details of the case emerged only with the BlueLeaks data breach in summer 2020, when a hacktivist group published 269 gigabytes of data from US federal, state and local police agencies, including intelligence reports, emails, photos, audio and video.

A report released with the hacked data states that Gupta was known to have met with members of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel in India, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand before his arrest.

Officials indicated Gupta was also known to be in communication with a Chinese national and this person had also met with a known Sinaloa cartel member. The Chinese national was later identified by US officials at the American embassy in Beijing, but no name was given in the leaked report.

In the leaked report, the Chinese national was said to be sending precursor chemicals to cartels in Mexico for the manufacture of fentanyl derivatives and finished fentanyl, as well as substances used to make methamphetamine.

“In late 2018, India emerged as a source country for fentanyl and fentanyl precursors trafficked by Mexican transnational criminal organisations [TCOs],” said Miller of the DEA. “India may assist with offsetting the regulations in China. Reporting indicates Mexican TCOs are expanding their sources of supply, but China remains the primary source country.”

As with Mondiale Mercantile, Aaron, when asked, said he had no recollection of Gupta. “Manu Gupta? Manu Gupta? We don’t have many Indian clients,” he said.

Minutes later, Aaron said he had indeed met Gupta, but had forgotten his name and would not have remembered it had it not been brought up in the interview.

“We are a small company and we did meet briefly with the Indian company, but never cooperated,” he said. “So they said they could help us expand into the Indian market and asked whether we’d like to work with them. So we put the photos on our website to make it look like we are a big company. But in reality, we never had any agreements, we had no cooperation other than seeing it as an opportunity to advertise us in India.”

Asked if he knew Gupta was now in jail, Aaron appeared surprised.

“Really? In jail? How did you know?” he asked. “I really didn’t know about this.”

Aaron then stated he had not had any of this information before the interview. “We just wanted to advertise and I never knew something was going on with him. But I see what you mean now. To us, this is very strange, because we always obey the laws and regulations when doing our business and providing services to our clients. For me, I don’t think it was the right thing to do. He shouldn’t have done it. It all makes sense now that you would deduce that we were working with them. I finally understand that. It’s natural.”

The day after the interview, the company structure chart was changed. Mondiale had been removed.

Primeship refused further interviews and requests, and after November 23 it started taking down websites, but its employees continued to offer fentanyl precursors to journalists posing as buyers through December.

In the end, Pardo says, some Chinese chemical traders may not even know much about the products they are marketing. They only see the cold hard cash coming into their bank accounts and not the cold hard cadavers at the end of the supply chain.

“In many cases they don’t really care,” he says. “They’re just producing chemicals they know they can sell.”