Fentanyl Floods Into U.S., Used for Bogus Pills
China is flooding the U.S. with fentanyl—25 to 50 times stronger than heroin—and traffickers are using it to counterfeit painkillers.
It was a hot February day on the U.S.-Mexico border when an observant customs officer noticed that a teenager crossing the Otay Mesa checkpoint had a suspicious bulge in his crotch. When officers escorted the 19-year-old out of the pedestrian lane and patted him down, they found a package in his underwear holding what they thought were almost 1,200 oxycodone pills.
But tests that were run after the arrest by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) lab revealed the pills were counterfeits composed of fentanyl—an extremely potent drug that
