IT WAS a distinctive smell, similar to vinegar, seeping from the newly built home at the top of the hill that prompted a resident in Tijuana’s Lomas del Valle neighbourhood to make an anonymous call to the police in October last year.
A few nights later three patrol cars were seen heading up the potholed road to the elevated dusty area, a 50-minute drive and a world away from the souvenir stores and tequila bars of Mexico’s main northern border city. Their target was a squat, grey building that seemed in a permanently stalled state of construction.
As police drew close they spotted two men outside, loading bags into a car. Catching sight of their unwelcome visitors, the suspects bolted off into the darkness. The officers knew they had the right place and broke into the building. Inside they found a makeshift laboratory equipped with all the paraphernalia of synthetic drug production. There were buckets, blenders and a pill-pressing machine. A thin layer of acrid white powder coated every surface.
In one corner was a large icebox, the type that might be used to take cold drinks to a beach. It contained more than 300 000 light blue pills of pure fentanyl. In total police confiscated 207kg of the synthetic opiate, enough to kill tens of millions of people, and with a street value of about $4,9 million (R88 million).
Fentanyl abuse is the world’s deadliest drug crisis. The front line of the calamity is just 16km from that raided lab, over the border in the United States. As many as 200 Americans a day are dying from overdoses of what some pushers call the “Crazy One”.
The drug is most commonly injected or taken in pill form by abusers. Some smoke it, which overcomes the struggle for hardened addicts of
