A Flood of New, Deadlier Drugs

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This is The Daily. Just as America is beginning to wrap its arms around the fentanyl crisis, a new kind of drug epidemic is emerging. It's faster, more addictive, and far more lethal, and what's driving it are new types of synthetic drugs,

substances that can be made almost anywhere. Altered endlessly, traffic easily, and then consumed in just about any form imaginable. Today, my colleague Osam Ahmed explains how these deadlier drugs are beginning to take hold, and brings us inside one effort to do something about it. It's Tuesday, May 26.

[Music] Osam, welcome to The Daily. It's wonderful to have you here in New York. Well, thank you for having me. You are here, not only because you have won multiple awards for your investigations.

This is true, you can't deny it.

“Not only because you are, I think it's fair to say, a foreign correspondence, foreign correspondent,”

but because you are in the middle of truly mind-blowing, reporting on the new world of synthetic drugs. And I think this is something that none of us even me, who, you know, I have a special interest reporting experiences in this world really understood until you started to break these stories. So, I want to just start with how you got to this, what drew you into these stories. You know, obviously, we work together in Mexico and in Mexico, you're constantly looking at the repercussions of the war on drugs.

You're looking at countless lives, lost, you're looking at, you know, inordinate amounts of drugs, fentanyl, moving north into the United States. You kind of see the mechanism of failure up close, and we all know the war on drugs is failed. We also know, like, it not only failed, it kind of made things worse.

And you realize, fentanyl, meth, two of the first sort of synthetic drugs were out there.

Basically, they were harbingers of this sort of dystopian future that is upon us. For most of human history, drugs have been grown in the land. You know, when the more on drugs was first declared by President Nixon, there was cocaine, marijuana, heroin, the big ones. Now there's, like, 1,450 new psychoactive substances, these are novel tests or real stuff.

It's going up like, it's tripled in the last decade. I mean, the number of new drugs that are coming out. It's like chefs testing new recipes because it's all synthetic now. It's made in labs and you can basically turn a molecule and change it in all these different ways and have a completely new drug,

which basically leads to the major point that they are largely more potent, more deadly,

easier to manufacture, easier to smuggle, harder to track, harder to treat, and more profitable than almost any time in human history. What you're describing is the kind of beginning of something, but that beginning is really important,

“this idea that you get a drug like fentanyl, 50 times more powerful, I think, than heroin.”

It's really compact. It's really easy to transport. It's really easy to make. You can make it. I saw in a kitchen in Cinaloa. So, randomly you can open a lab anywhere. There is a kind of revolution that happens with that first step. Exactly. And I think, for a good reason, we in the United States look at fentanyl as almost the end all be all because of how many, I mean, he's like massive numbers of death. We're not accustomed to that.

It's so pervasive and yet there are now new drugs, much more powerful than fentanyl, they're popping up, not just in the United States, but all over the world. Okay, talk about that. I want to hear about that. So drug called nightzines can be 20 to 40 times more potent than fentanyl. They're an opioid that was created in the 1950s by Swiss pharmaceutical,

but turned out to be so potent that it didn't really have a natural market.

And so it never went to market. And then somebody basically as this sort of fentanyl crisis was unfolding,

mind some archive and found the formula for making nightzines and they started producing it. Once they started producing it, they now have like a dozen different variants of nightzines that have been discovered all over the place. You're finding them in the United States.

is because fentanyl has been so controlled and so tightly managed.

“And this is important because this is the heart and center of why the drug war”

kind of made everything worse. So you're like, shit, we gotta do something about fentanyl. This is killing way too many people. Let's control the precursor chemicals. Let's pressure Chinese, farm up from making this stuff. Let's crack down on the Mexican cartels. Great. This is the approach of the drug war. It's a focus on enforcement. To focus on supplies. Supplies. Supplies on the supply side. And then they're like, oh cool. Okay, we'll just come up with

something else. So now they've made nightzines available on the market. And that is gradually expanding and more people are dying from it. But now there's things that are even going to replace nightzines that are popping up in certain places. That is the thing about synthetic drugs.

Basically what you've described is the idea that regulation just breeds innovation.

Innovation. It's one of the most entrepreneurial markets in the world. I mean, they find new ways because as long as you have demand, someone's going to figure out a supply, because if it's restricted, it's going to be lucrative. I mean, we're looking at a totally different universe. Okay. So now I want to talk about your latest investigation that recently came out. That talks about the Cook County jail in Chicago. Because while these drugs might not be on

every street corner yet, you have found that the place that they're almost being incubated is in American jails and prisons. So walk me through what you found in Cook County. Walk me through that story. So in January 2023, jail authorities are called to the scene of a dead body. And they show up and there is this inmate who basically is died from some kind of overdose, but they can't find anything. There's no contraband. They just find all these little paper

roaches, sort of scattered around like burned confetti. And they're kind of mystified by what this

is, but it's clear the guys overdose. And it sort of launches them on this incredible

Odyssey where they start having these deaths and these crazy overdoses, people going into almost these exorcistic fits, having seizures. And they're watching them on camera and then it clicks or like, oh my god, they're smoking paper. They're literally smoking paper and they realize what's happened is someone has figured out how to turn synthetic drugs into liquid, soak sheets of paper into it, and then smuggle paper into the jail. No, paper is the most ubiquitous thing in the world.

“It's been around since ancient Egypt. Right. How do you stop paper?”

Well, so just to back up what is on this paper? Like do they know you're describing the exorcistic fit and I'm wondering what causes that? At the time they don't know what's on it. They would find someone high or maybe find someone dead. They would get a toxicology report of the person who died to figure out what they might have smoked. They would also find paper within the jail facility itself and they'd send that off to get tested. There'll be anything

from like cannabinoids, which is a synthetic form of cannabis, which can actually be deadly to sometimes fentanyl, like all different kinds of synthetic substances. I mean at some point they were finding recipes for raid and rap poison. And then in August of 2024, they found this single sheet of paper that had 10 different synthetic drugs on it, which didn't make any sense, right? Because it was all different sorts of

things that have different corporal implications, right? Like it was cannabinoids, it was opioids, it like they affected you. The high is different. Is it 10 different substances all in different quadrants? No, they're overlapping. It basically, well, the best we could figure is somebody had a bunch of chemicals they were spraying on paper and they just wanted to get rid of them. So they dumped them all on one sheet and that I went in. I mean from your reporting on fentanyl, there's not

really a calculation of how deadly this could be, how potent this is going to be. To the extent that there's a calculation, the calculation is how bad can we make this? I mean, how potent, how strong. Completely, that's exactly right. It's the more potent, the less I have to smuggle. Correct. Right, the less risk I take. Yeah. The more potent it's usually cheaper, too. Yeah.

You know, you get, never, it's like the bang for the buck phenomenon. Okay, I want to ask about

“what the experience of actually doing it is. I mean, I think part of the other thing that a lot of”

people who don't use these drugs don't understand is what is attractive about the feeling. So just walk through the implications of people rushing to use a substance that is life-threatening. Completely. What, what is happening there? What's the psychology of that? It's one of the most baffling things for non, for non-using public to understand about the mentality of drug use. And it is that like death is not dissuasive. You know, someone dies and our reaction is like,

oh my god, why would anybody ever touch that? Right. But if you are a user, you're like, that must be really strong. And I remember having conversations with people in the jail, like, you know, one guy that I spent a lot of time with was Rashad Rauhry. And he had previously smoked paper,

given a Christmas. He was one of the top holidays. He was on lockdown. And I'm like, it's like,

“why not? I like that. But I'm like, he was like a really thoughtful guide into why people use it and”

how they use it. It's hard being a jail. It's very hard being a jail. Like, definitely, you watch if somebody grew up through pictures is hard. I've been here 11 years. And you guys, that's like, whatever. Sometimes you get high, you don't even care about going home. You don't care. It is what it is. When you sort of describes the desperation and the sadness, this need to escape from sort of your life collapsing in on you.

You already think about the consequences behind it. We just think about this right here. I won't this. No matter what happened, I won't this. I ain't going to be the one to death from it. There's also a huge component of these crises of tolerance. Nobody quickly adapts to whatever toxins it's putting into it such that you need more. So if you're a regular user and you know,

“there's a heavy pack and somebody died. And your objective is to escape in a profound way as you can,”

like a portal out of the misery of jail and all the trappings of life that that entails, you move towards it, not away from it. And you might be saying, well, that person who died, they just weren't used to it. They were saw, they weren't like me. Exactly. Exactly. Like I can handle it. I've built up this tolerance. Yeah, there's a weird sense of confidence and almost competitiveness about who can use more drugs and how, you know, how much potency you can handle.

But what's in the creative part about this, so many people want to stop smoking. So many people want to actually stop. Really? Yes. But don't know how. They don't even know what they're addicted to, do they? No. Not really. How does it work? After the break, I was going to explain how the authorities at the Cook County jail tried to stop synthetic drugs from flooding in.

We'll be right back.

“I'm Dan Barry and I'm a longtime reporter with the New York Times. I've been here for 30 years and I've”

seen a lot of things change. I was here before there was a website. But one thing hasn't changed at all, and that's the mission of the New York Times, to follow the facts wherever they lead. And if that means publishing something a government or a leader or a celebrity doesn't want

to aired, that's not our concern. I've never been told to go against the facts to accommodate

anyone. And if I had, I would have quite frankly left the building. This is the way it was when I was covering the aftermath of 9/11. And this is the way it is now, as I cover the United States of today. If you believe in the importance of fact-driven reporting, you can support it by becoming a New York Times subscriber. And if you already subscribe, this veteran reporter, thanks you. So as I'm telling me how this jail goes about dealing with this problem, keeping these drugs out.

So they are basically like, how do we get rid of paper? The sheriff of Cook County calls around to other jurisdictions facing similar problems. Because now this is becoming a nationwide phenomenon. I mean, I found instances of 14 different states that have had some kind of prosecution for drugs-so-paper in carceral facilities. So it's not just Cook County. Yeah, it's all over the place. So some of these places have decided we're going to ban paper outright. Yeah. And he's like,

"I didn't want to do that." The thing about paper is it's a lifeline for people in jail. You know, it's not just administrative numbers and like, you know, menus or whatever else they use paper for. It is a letter from a child to his father. It is a note from a mother to her son. Right. It is the thing that tathers you to the world outside of this dark space of privation that is the Cook County jail. So they start with things like sensing the texture of soaked paper.

Guys would start wearing gloves and going through pages of every individual piece of mail by hand. This is crazy to think about someone just like holding a piece of paper and like feeling it and smelling it to be like, "Are there just extremely deadly drugs on this?" Yeah, exactly like to this kill people in our jail, completely. So they made sure they were following all the protocols

monitoring this in a much more comprehensive way. But basically, the leaves sort of criminal investigator

inside the jail is this guy named Justin Wilkes. He's like, "It's not enough to like play defense

And he's like, "You're sort of central casting of like a Midwestern nice guy. He's a

vunculer. He has glasses. He never curses instead of using words like as he says "kester."

“I mean, in a jail environment, that's like, that's pretty exceptional. Did you have to”

censor yourself around him? I mean, I felt, initially, yeah, I felt like self-conscious. I curse a lot. So I was like, "You can judge me for this. I keep talking to me." He corrects me by saying "kester." So he kind of lays down that as like goal number one. We got to figure out what's happening. And this launches them on this really stounding investigation. jailhouse niches would tell things here and there, but even the corrections officers, nobody

was really saying like, "This is the main supply." This is the guy who's producing it or the groups that are producing it. And then they find there's this one prisoner who had been, you know, basically been caught with paper stuffed in his anus. And he's been prosecuted for having this, but they start wondering, "Why did he get it?" So they look at every single one of his prison visits for like an extended period prior to him being busted in the jail with his paper. And they realize

that over the course of, you know, months, he is girlfriend who had come to visit him would always

“slip him paper. And they're like, "Oh, wow." So she was slipping him paper, like what?”

Because they have like, it'd be like me and you sitting here talking where they would have visitation house. Someone would distract the guard and she would find a way to get him paper. Wow. It's not like a dog is going to pick up that smell. You know, at the time they might not have even known what they were looking for. So another detective, he shows up at the girlfriend's house and he basically just gets her to talk. And she describes his whole network of like,

all these different prisoners with girlfriends who are all coming and visiting and doing the same thing. And it all ties back to this one dealer operating out of the South Side of Chicago. And so they get on this huge case. They're like, "Wait a minute. We actually know who's behind this. So they start tracking this guy." They realize, I guess, this huge stash house in the South of Chicago. Uh-huh. They're like, "This is big. We've actually found a guy who was doing stuff across

state lines. He is what we believe to be the single biggest supplier to the Cook County jail of drugs of paper. This guy is like a paper band." And you can see all from the girlfriend.

Often the girlfriend. So we follow this case for almost a year. Until finally like,

I'm there when they arrest the main figure. You know, we're all like sort of barreling down this suburban street. They like pull up in front of this house with like one of these signal blocker trucks. Somebody bashes down the door. They send a drone into search of the house. And then everybody floods in. And it's crazy because it's like this new drug bust. They come out carrying these like amber bottles filled with chemicals. And like sheets of paper. It's got like a postal setup in

this house with like, you know, pre-paid envelopes to send drug soap paper to different places presumably. And it's just this dude operating out of there. Okay, so they find this guy. They find this guy. They bust him. He gets a rain. And I go back to Cook County. I'm like, wow, you know, like a year later here it is. You've busted like the biggest paper pusher in Illinois, presumably like what's going to happen.

And in my mind, I guess I already kind of knew. I was like, this isn't going to change anything. Like it's, every time we take down a king pin, it ranges from like bad to worse. The response to it. I mean, our time in Mexico. Yeah. Every time they killed one of these couples, they like announced it with this sort of saberaddle of like, look, we did it again. And every time there would be a fight for control, there would be more violence, worst case scenario

would be the hydro effect where they cut off the hem, multiple heads sprung up. And then you just had disorganized chaos. The same way they bust this guy. And I'm talking to Justin, the investigator.

“And he's like, did we solve a mystery today? Yes. Did we solve the mystery? Do I think this is going”

to change the phenomenon? He's like, no. So after all that, he basically recognizes, yeah, this is a win for us, but this is nowhere near the end, doing this is not going to solve the problem. This is another spoke in the turning wheel. You know? I mean, did it, did that pan out? It did. It did. A couple months later, I checked in on the data and they were like, we're having the same number of overdoses. They now have something that's five times more potent on paper there.

Wow. But also around that time, they found new ways and novel ways in which they're getting the drugs in. People had figured out how to use Amazon to send drug soap paper into the jail. Through Amazon. Through Amazon, basically someone would register as a third party seller, would have a drug soap book listed on that. And then the person would buy from that direct seller, thereby sort of laundering a drug soap book through Amazon and Amazon packaging, which made it

incredibly difficult. Because prior to that, John's authorities were like, we don't have to worry about that. It's coming from Amazon. Let's crazy. What an image. It was just that representative

different. We're going to crack down on that. Okay. They're going to do something else. We're going to crack down on this drug. Okay. We're going to get another drug. And this is in the most

“controlled setting. You can imagine that I think is what scares them the most because they're”

having a hard time controlling that in a jail setting. What happens when that hits the street? Okay. So now that you have your arms kind of wrapped around just how bad this new synthetic drug epidemic really is, just how much invention and reinvention is kind of built into it, I want to ask and I want to turn to the question of, what do we do now? Because I think a lot of people who here this and who have not spent more than a year covering it are going to be wondering, like, how do we

stop this? What is the path? It's funny. You know, as journalists we try to like kind of stick with like presenting what's happening, but you can't help but think about what's the road that let us hear? Is there a road to lead us out or are we kind of trapped in this cyclical framework where we just keep doing more of the same thing? And that is the inescapable feeling, especially with this administration, which has opted to kick more ass, so to speak against drug cartels and

smuggling and all of that, is that that hasn't worked. You might see the Mexican police motivated to like bust an arch of it. We've busted a lot of these guys before and all of those are just a new king pin emerges. What about the other option, the alternate route here from the one that the drug war has taken addressing demand? Yeah, legalization or decriminalization or anyway of kind of yes of getting at the assumption side, the fact that in Mexico the idea that you're going to stop

drugs from being produced without dealing with the fact that the largest consumer market in the entire world sits right on top of this country on its border is sort of laughable. What about those methods? How do you see that? Is that a potential way forward here? The thing that struck me is like this whole framework around legalization, decriminalization, we have been talking about it for so long. There's a few countries that have done it like Portugal, but by and large,

experiencing this have been few and far between and it's mostly just been a talking point

among progressives. The problem is it's too dangerous to kind of have a decriminalization procedure

that creates a wider array of availability for things that chemists and scientists and doctors themselves don't know the human imitations. Like 90sians has never been tested in a medical setting for any long period of time. We're still arguing about a paradigm that might have worked when there were just three or four drugs we were worried about. That word about 1400 counting. So what you're talking about is a situation where like maybe decriminalization could have been a

solution in before times, but we're not in before times. The horse is out of the barn basically. Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying. So I think to answer your bigger question which is what do we do? If you talk to a lot of scientists, they'll be like, yeah, I don't think legalization

“is the way or decriminalization is the way to go either. You should have elements of this like”

harm reduction for instance. Right. That is an important component of this that Europe is really focused on. Norm reduction is basically what it sounds like. We understand people are going to use

drugs. We understand that we're never going to be able to fully reduce all of demand. So how do we keep

deaths, serious injury from happening? That's interesting. We swap needles. Right. So no one's sharing needles. HIV rates plummet. We issue Narcan everywhere so that if your friend overdoses, you give him a shot in Narcan. You revive them. They don't die. We pass laws. It are like, if you call the cops or rather the authorities because your friend is overdosing, you're where they're going to die. We're not going to prosecute you or send you to jail because that

then means fewer people will die. It's treating it as a public health crisis and not a criminal problem. Exactly. Which is something the United States is always struggled with. It sounds like what you've learned is that we don't have the language to describe what we're seeing. And so a first step is to just all of us wrap our minds around what this isn't really

“changed. Aren't I a framework of thinking about it? I think that's right. I think it's also just”

looking at it with like dispassionate brutal honesty, which has always been hard for us. We are still

thinking that blowing up boats or like targeting kingpins is going to stop this and it's clearly not. You can have little bits of pressure and maybe that can even be a good thing to force the Mexicans to actually do something about this gigantic industry within their borders. But that's not going to solve it. We've never needed more creative thinking about this problem because it's never been more dangerous or creative. We're kind of moving in opposite directions

on one of the most costly issues of our time. Thank you so much for being on the show. No thanks for having me. We'll be right back.

forces had carried out new strikes on missile launch sites in Iran and on boats trying to

“place mines. US Central Command said the strikes were defensive and intended to protect US troops.”

The strikes came hours after Iran's top negotiators arrived in Qatar for talks on a peace agreement with the US. The terms of any potential deal remain unclear though, including the fate of

Iran's nuclear program its missile stockpile and whether it would keep exerting control over

the straight of war moves. Israel also signaled on Monday that it intended to escalate fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon which could further complicate the talks. Iran has said that any agreement to end the war with the US and Israel should also cover the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah.

“And a gunman was shot and killed by secret service officers on Saturday after he opened fire”

near the White House. Trump was in the building at the time and it made it known that he would be spending the weekend there. A bystander who was struck by gun fire was in stable condition on Sunday. Finally, artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from lodgics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.

“Pope Leo 14 delivered a stark warning to humanity on Monday about the risks of artificial intelligence.”

Decisions about technology must never be separated from conscience and responsibility.

That's not. The message came in what's known as a Papal Encyclical, which is a central result form of communication used by the Pope to deliver teachings on moral or social challenges. He specifically called for government regulation of the company's driving the AI boom, retraining for the workers threatened by it, and actions to shield children from hyper-sexualized or fake AI-generated information.

Today's episode was produced by Christina Avalos, mustafamirza, David Herr, Austa-Chottervady, Mary Wilson, Nina Feldman, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Page Cowett and Devon Greenleaf, with help from Michael Benoit and Rob Zipko, and contains music by Dan Powell and Marion Luzano. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroleth. See you tomorrow.