Mexican Cartels Lure Chemistry Students to Make Fentanyl
Criminals turn college campuses into recruitment hubs, recruiting chemistry students in Mexico with big paydays.
Mexican Cartels Lure Chemistry Students to Make Fentanyl
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Criminals turn college campuses into recruitment hubs, recruiting chemistry students in Mexico with big paydays.
Dec. 1, 2024Updated 11:08 a.m. ET
A person wears a ski mask and sunglasses to protect his identity.
A 19-year-old sophomore chemistry major, who also works for the Sinaloa drug cartel, at a stash house.Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
By Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Villegas
Reporting from Culiacán in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stronghold of the Sinaloa Cartel and a hub of fentanyl production
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The cartel recruiter slipped onto campus disguised as a janitor and then zeroed in on his target: a sophomore chemistry student.
The recruiter explained that the cartel was staffing up for a project, and that he’d heard good things about the young man.
“‘You’re good at what you do,’” the student recalled the recruiter saying. “‘You decide if you’re interested.’”
In their quest to build fentanyl empires, Mexican criminal groups are turning to an unusual talent pool: not hit men or corrupt police officers, but chemistry students studying at Mexican universities.
People who make fentanyl in cartel labs, who are called cooks, told The New York Times that they needed workers with advanced knowledge of chemistry to help make the drug stronger and “get more people hooked,” as one cook put it.
The cartels also have a more ambitious goal: to synthesize the chemical compounds, known as precursors, that are essential to making fentanyl, freeing them from having to import those raw materials from China.
If they succeed, U.S. officials say, it would represent a terrifying new phase in the fentanyl crisis, in which Mexican cartels have more control than ever over one of the deadliest drugs in recent history.
“It would make us the kings of Mexico,” said one chemistry student who has been cooking fentanyl for six months.
Large jugs of chemicals and trash bags.
Chemicals used to produce fentanyl on the floor of a drug cartel safe house in Culiacán, Sinaloa.Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
The Times interviewed seven fentanyl cooks, three chemistry students, two high-ranking operatives and a high-level recruiter. All of them work for the Sinaloa Cartel, which the U.S. government says is largely responsible for the fentanyl pouring over the southern border.
Those affiliated with the cartel put themselves in danger just by talking to The Times, and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Their accounts matched those of American Embassy officials who track cartel activities, including the role students are playing in cartel operations and how they are producing fentanyl. Times reporters spoke to a chemistry professor, who said the recruitment of his students was common.
The students said they had different jobs within the criminal group. Sometimes, they said, they run experiments to strengthen the drug or to create precursors. Other times, they say, they supervise or work alongside the cooks and assistants who produce fentanyl in bulk.
It’s unclear how widespread the recruitment of students has become, but the pursuit of trained chemists seems to have been influenced in part by the coronavirus pandemic.
A 2020 Mexican intelligence assessment, leaked by a hacker group, found that the Sinaloa Cartel appeared to be recruiting chemistry professors to develop fentanyl precursor chemicals after the pandemic slowed supply chains.
American law enforcement officials also said that many young chemists had been swept up in arrests at Mexican fentanyl labs in recent years. The arrested chemists told the authorities that they had been working on developing precursors and making the drug stronger, according to the officials.
A chemistry professor at a university in Sinaloa State said he knew that some students enrolled in chemistry classes just to become more familiar with skills needed to cook synthetic drugs. The professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said he had identified students who fit that profile by their questions and reactions during his lectures.
“Sometimes when I am teaching them synthesis of pharmaceutical drugs, they openly ask me, ‘Hey, professor, when are you teaching us how to synthesize cocaine and other things?’” he said.
Eager to preserve cooperation on migration, the Biden administration avoided publicly urging Mexico to do more to dismantle the cartels. President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised a more aggressive approach, threatening to deploy the U.S. military to battle the criminals, and vowing last month to issue a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods if the country doesn’t stop the flow of drugs and migrants across the border.
In response to the tariff threat, Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said that “international collaboration” was needed to prevent the shipment of precursors to Mexico from “Asian countries.”
But as the cartels gain greater control of the fentanyl supply chain, U.S. officials say, it will become more difficult for law enforcement in both countries to stop the industrialized production of synthetic opioids in Mexico.
The cartels “know we are now focused on the illicit trafficking of these precursor chemicals around the world,” said Todd Robinson, the State Department’s assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
Those efforts are driving the cartels “to try to bring this thing in-house,” Mr. Robinson said. “The practical result of that is their ability to more easily and quickly transfer those drugs to the United States.”
Mass producing fentanyl can be relatively straightforward if cartels are just mixing up imported precursors, experts said, because it’s easy to find instructions for producing the drug using those chemicals.
But trying to synthesize the precursors from scratch is a much more difficult process that requires a broader array of chemical techniques and skills, said James DeFrancesco, a forensic science professor at Loyola University Chicago who worked as a forensic chemist at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for 18 years.
The process is also dangerous. Cooks and students said that even though they wore gas masks and hazmat suits, the risks they face are many: toxic exposure to the lethal drug, accidental explosions, mistakes that enrage their armed and extremely violent bosses.
Yet the work pays more than many legal jobs in chemistry, and that’s often enough of a sell. The second-year student said the recruiter who visited the campus had offered him $800 up front, plus a monthly salary of $800 — twice as much as the average pay for chemists formally employed in Mexico, according to government data.
