Inside the Fentanyl Supply Chain: Michael Brown

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Currently, there is a surplus of fentanyl pills in America. The surplus, I believe, is driving increased addiction rates, because now fentanyl pill prices are going down. Drug usage is going up. Addiction rates are going up.”

In this episode, I sat down with Michael Brown, a former DEA special agent and the current director of Counter-Narcotics Technology for Rigaku Analytical Devices.

The cartels are now mass producing or have the capacity to mass produce multi-ton quantities of fentanyl, which is a direct indication that they’re receiving more precursor chemicals from China,” said Brown.

We dug deep into the fentanyl crisis and illicit drug trade in the United States and got an insider’s look into the narcotic supply chain, from China, to Mexico, to the southern U.S. border.

“We’ve passed the point of no return in terms of reducing addiction in rate to what’s coming into the country in terms of narcotics—meaning, until we can reduce the supply chain, we’re not going to be able to reduce the addiction rate,” said Brown.

But how best to reduce the supply chain? Is it merely a matter of sealing our border?

“We know that 98% of all the narcotics coming into the United States are transported in vehicles—in commercial cargo that come across the United States. So, for me, the vulnerability for the cartels is that transportation cross-border network that they have,” said Brown.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Michael Brown, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Michael Brown:
I appreciate the invitation. Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
The governor of Texas recently posted that Operation Lone Star has seized over 500 million lethal doses of fentanyl, enough to kill every man, woman, and child in both the U.S. and Mexico combined. That sounds like an astonishing number, and an astonishing reality. This is your area of expertise. What is going on here?

Mr. Brown:
That’s just an indication of the current situation, and that’s just in Texas. That doesn’t include statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA], Homeland Security Investigations [HSI], and U.S. Customs and Border Inspection [CBP], which would probably be another 100 million pills. Last year, the DEA alone seized 77 million pills. If we look at the intelligence that we’re receiving from the Mexican Navy on the precursor chemical seizures at their major ports, they’ve seen a tenfold increase in precursor chemicals.

They’ve seen a tenfold increase in the use of these chemicals to make not only fentanyl, but also methamphetamine and heroin. Across the board, we’re seeing a dramatic increase in the ability of the cartels to acquire the essential precursor chemicals or dual-purpose chemicals for producing fentanyl and methamphetamine, which they then ship into the United States for nationwide distribution.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us how the supply chain works for these precursors, from start to finish.

Mr. Brown:
Historically, going back to the days of Pablo Escobar in the early 90s, we can look at the precursor chemicals for cocaine. He was getting his primary precursor for cocaine production, acidic anhydride, from China, and also India to some degree. But for the last three decades, China has always been the primary supplier of narcotic precursors to the Mexican cartels. Let’s just narrow it down and talk about fentanyl. China is the primary supplier of precursor chemicals for the illicit production of fentanyl in clandestine labs in Mexico, which is then shipped into the United States.

Mr. Jekielek:
How does that translate into the current statistics? It is estimated that 70,000 people a year are now dying from fentanyl.

Mr. Brown:
Actually in 2022, we saw about 84,000 people die specifically related to opioid overdoses, primarily fentanyl. That went down 3 percent to about 80,000 in 2023. That reduction across the country was related to the use of Narcan. Everyone is carrying it. There has not been a reduction in overdoses, but there has been a reduction in overdose fatalities, primarily due to everyone having Narcan.

But again, Governor Abbott has demonstrated that the cartels now have the capacity to mass produce multi-ton quantities of fentanyl. That is a direct indication that they’re receiving more precursor chemicals from China to initiate that process. That is a significant problem.

Mr. Jekielek:
What does fentanyl look like visually? We know that microdoses of fentanyl can be lethal. You’ve been in on fentanyl arrests. What does that process look like?

Mr. Brown:
I retired from the DEA after 32 years of service in 2020. Fentanyl was just coming on the scene in 2012 through 2018. At that time I was the DEA attache in Myanmar, dealing with methamphetamine. Fast forward to today, I am recently retired, and I’m now looking at the fentanyl situation.
If you open up an artificial sweetener and see that white powder, that’s what fentanyl looks like. But fentanyl is 100 times more powerful than morphine, and 50 times more powerful than heroin.

Everybody has seen that image of a pencil with a little bit of fentanyl on it, most likely about two milligrams, which is enough to kill a full grown adult in roughly 30 minutes. We’re talking about an extremely powerful synthetic opioid that is now being distributed across our country. It’s sourced in Mexico, then distributed by domestic trafficking groups that are responsible for 80 to 84,000 overdose deaths a year.

Mr. Jekielek:
What does a typical fentanyl bust at the border look like? Is it a truckload of fentanyl, or is it someone who had a baggie in their pocket?

Mr. Brown:
The easiest way to transport fentanyl is in the pill form. You’ll see a number of seizures made by Customs and Border Protection. There will be a false compartment in a car, and they’ll pull out six or seven kilo-sized bags, each containing around 100,000, to 200,000 fentanyl pills. According to the DEA, seven out of ten of those pills have a lethal dose of at least two milligrams of fentanyl. It comes across the border in the pills.

Those pills are then distributed across to domestic trafficking groups throughout the United States, and then they’re sold. People are taking those pills thinking it’s something else, like Adderall, Percocet, or Oxycontin, but it’s actually a fentanyl pill, and then they die. There are long-term substance users that buy those pills, grind them up, and then smoke it or inject it. Depending on the amount of fentanyl, it can either produce an overdose reaction or extend their long-term addiction. In both cases, you’re looking at a very serious substance use problem in our country.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are also adulterants that create what’s called zombie drugs on the street. You can see these pictures of people basically looking like zombies. How does that work?

Mr. Brown:
When I was on the job, traffickers would buy a kilogram of cocaine or heroin and they would cut it with an adulterant in order to increase the quantity. At that time, it was milk sugar or laxative or some non-toxic substance, and it reduced the potency of cocaine from 99 percent to one or two percent. They could sell more quantity and then make more money.

Now, with fentanyl, some trafficker came up with an idea to take the most powerful synthetic opioid on the market and cut it with another powerful opioid-based sedative, such as xylazine or nitazine. These are all very powerful sedatives that are being cut into fentanyl to increase the dosage amount. You now have more quantity and it also increases the potency.

As dangerous as fentanyl was, when you put some xylazine in the fentanyl, it increases or extends the effect of using the substance. Instead of a 30-minute high with a milligram of fentanyl, you put some xylazine in it and now the user can experience maybe an hour to two hours of intoxication. For users, that’s what they’re looking for—that extended high.

Xylazine causes extreme necrosis, which is the rotting of flesh around the injection points or other areas of the body. That’s causing a secondary medical issue which is spreading across the country. But due to their addiction, users are ignoring the necrosis effect in order to continue using the narcotics. The adulterants now present a more difficult problem, because many adulterants do not respond to Narcan.

If an individual is using fentanyl that has xylazine in it and they overdose and you apply the Narcan, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will be able to revive that individual. Xylazine and these other very dangerous adulterants complicate the revival process if someone goes into an overdose based on fentanyl usage.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some cities have these harm reduction policies which are tolerant of drug use, and have these open air injection sites where you can see people using these zombie drugs. Earlier, you mentioned that there are people who accidentally take fentanyl, thinking that they are taking Adderall. How does that work?

Mr. Brown:
Adderall is a prescription drug. There is a very large percentage of the population in America that is addicted to prescription drugs. We can look back at Purdue Pharma and its drug, OxyContin. It was a prescription drug, highly addictive, and it led to the current opioid addiction. People got addicted to OxyContin, then switched to heroin, and then switched to fentanyl. You can track the progression, starting from this prescription drug.

On my podcast, The Opioid Matrix, I’ve had a lot of parents on the show who had fantastic children. One young lady had a son in college. He was an all-star athlete on his way to the majors. He took an Adderall from a friend and it turned out to be fentanyl. She goes to wake him up in the morning and he’s dead.

You have a large percentage of individuals who are not predisposed to hardcore narcotic usage, but do have an addiction or a tendency to use prescription drugs like Oxycontin, Valium, and other such medications which can be sold illegally. But the rate of these types of overdoses leading to fatalities is increasing. That’s a different paradigm than the individual on the street who has been a long-term substance user.

Mr. Jekielek:
The doctors are no longer giving these people the prescription they once had. Then they go on the street because they still need to get that drug. With Adderall, people even use it for studying. How big is the market for these kinds of street prescription drugs?

Mr. Brown:
The illicit prescription drug market is enormous and it’s something we really never hear about. At the DEA we had a number of investigations which were targeting doctors and pharmacies who were selling illegal prescriptions. There was a point in time where you could go in and you could purchase a prescription pad. I’m going back a number of years where you’d have to fill out and falsify the information, then take it to a pharmacy. The pharmacy, knowing that it was fake, would still issue the prescription, let’s say for Oxycontin or for value. That was the big drug that was being abused.

For years we have had a huge population of individuals who are addicted to prescription drugs. Then suddenly there’s a crackdown after Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma. Doctors are now saying, “I’m only going to give you six pills.” But six isn’t enough because the prior week you were getting 36 pills, and suddenly your six pills have run out. Now, you’re turning to the street dealer or the heroin dealer who says, “I can take care of you.” Then the heroin substitutes for that prescription addiction.

But unbeknownst to the user, within that heroin is a little bit of fentanyl and the user gets addicted to the fentanyl. Then the user will buy pure fentanyl and either cut it himself or take the risk that it’s not a lethal portion and ingest it. Once you cross the line into the illicit market, the traffickers know you have an addiction issue, so they will slowly move you from legal prescription drugs or legal distribution to hard narcotics. They know that once you hit heroin, it’s a very short path to fentanyl.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re being given something that is a weaker drug, but it’s been adulterated with this stronger drug, and then you get hooked. That’s the model.

Mr. Brown:
If you were using Valium and suddenly your prescription is cut off, you’re going to go to someone who says that they’re selling real Valium pills. They will have a pill that looks like Valium—same stamp, same numbers, same everything, but it will be fentanyl. The individual has no idea what they are really taking, but they’re trusting their best friend, their doctor, or their distributor that it is actually Valium. However, the seller may not even know what it is, because he bought it from somebody else. Along that supply chain, it touches a lot of hands. By the time it gets to the user’s hand, they’re just taking a chance that it’s a really Valium.

Mr. Jekielek:
From the perspective of the fentanyl dealer, once people are hooked, that’s great.

Mr. Brown:
That is the whole concept of drug trafficking. They know they’re selling an incredibly addictive substance that you don’t have to resell. Once an individual becomes addicted, it sells itself. The addiction keeps the trafficker in business.

Mr. Jekielek:
The reason a trafficker didn’t want to make a drug too strong is because someone that’s dead is no longer a customer. But with fentanyl, that concept seems to be broken. From the perspective of the trafficker, why is it now acceptable for people to be dying in these large numbers?

Mr. Brown:
I often get asked that question. The most frequent question I ever get asked is, “Why do drug dealers want to kill their clients?” But they’re not intentionally setting out to kill their clients. Back to my time in Detroit when I was working a heroin investigation, there was a particular organization that put out a bad batch of heroin.

It was cut with some toxic substance that immediately killed 10 or 15 people. It was a very violent death from ingesting sodium cyanide or arsenic. It’s not a pleasant way to die. When that heroin came out and people died, everybody backed away from it. Users backed away and they stopped buying it. The police came down hard on these trafficking organizations.

If you were a drug trafficker, it was common knowledge not to sell something that’s going to intentionally kill your clients. One, it’s bad for business and you reduce sales. Two, the police are going to come after you. That was the market paradigm for many years.

But then we move into fentanyl. They saw a number of people dying, but not dying in a violent way. They just go into a high, pass out, have cardiac arrest, and then they die. The cartel saw that even though people were dying, sales continued to increase. Substance users continued to buy it, thinking that fentanyl presented the ultimate high, because it brought you very close to that near-death experience.

At the end of 2022, the cartels noticed that 84,000 people died, but sales were still increasing. We know sales are increasing because Mexico is seizing more precursor chemicals. China is selling more chemicals, which means they are producing more fentanyl and distributing it into the United States. This is even though we have seen a three percent decrease in overdose fatalities—not overdoses, but overdose fatalities over the last year.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about how these cartels work. We often think of a cartel as a gang, a somewhat disorganized group of people, but these are highly sophisticated operations. Effectively, they are working like corporations, just in a much more illicit way. Before that, please tell us about your background. You mentioned that you have 30 years in law enforcement and in the DEA.

Mr. Brown:
I graduated from college in 1984 and then graduated from the DEA Office of Training in 1989. Upon starting at the DEA, I joined a special operations group called Snowcap. This was a group of agents who had to go to the U.S. Army Ranger School and be certified special operations to work counter drug interdiction in Central and South America.

I was deployed and worked in Bolivia with the Bolivian Special Forces. Basically, our groups went out into the jungles and went after drug traffickers, drug transportation routes, airplanes, and clandestine cocaine laboratories. I did that for about four or five years, then transferred to Central America, where I worked in Guatemala and Honduras for a number of years.

I then worked in the United States in Detroit for about ten years. But having worked overseas, I saw that having boots on the ground and hands-on action would significantly affect the ability of trafficking groups to function. Therefore, I gravitated more towards the overseas, foreign environment.
After Detroit, I spent another ten years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working with law enforcement in that region. Then I spent a number of years in India and Myanmar, again, working larger transnational criminal organizations, trying to mitigate their ability to produce and ship narcotics to the United States and the rest of the world.

Next, I spent a few years at DEA headquarters, working transnational organized crime groups and focusing on the fentanyl situation. I then retired in 2020 and took a job at Rigaku Analytical Devices in business manager development, and as the director of counternarcotics technology. Rigaku makes Raman spectroscopy laser hand units, which can identify unknown substances, narcotics, precursor chemicals, and explosives.

Mr. Jekielek:
Is that the device being used for drug identification?

Mr. Brown:
Yes, exactly. It is the latest technology for drug identification.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have a friend who was a member of the Sinaloa cartel and then ended up turning the tables on them.

Mr. Brown:
Right. It’s actually an individual I met recently in the 2020 to 2021 time period. He and his brother were based in Chicago and were the main distributors for the Sinaloa cartel. They were moving upwards of 10 to 20 metric tons of cocaine a month that they were receiving from the Sinaloa cartel. Over a number of years he was making between four and twelve million dollars a month, a significant amount of money.

He was just a large wholesaler. He would get cocaine from the Sinaloa cartel and then resell it to local distributors, who would then ship it across the United States. Of course, there came a time where he came across the radar of law enforcement. He turned himself in and became a cooperating witness. He did about 12 years in the federal penitentiary.

Now, he’s training and consulting with law enforcement on understanding the methodology of how cartels work. In talking to him, I gained great insight on how the cartels operate. He said, “There are the Fortune 500 companies, but the cartels are the Fortune 2 companies.” The Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel [CJNG] represent the two most profitable corporations in the world in terms of capability, profit, distribution, and money laundering.

These are very complicated organizations that are involved in legitimate as well as illegitimate businesses. They have lawyers, they have chemists, they have transportation experts, and they have accountants. They are also associated with the Chinese money laundering organizations. In every sense, they are utilizing a modern business model to flood America with a substance that’s killing roughly 100,000 people a year.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned that they are also involved in legitimate enterprises.

Mr. Brown:
When we look at the history of the Italian mafia, initially, they weren’t drug dealers at all. They were into extortion, construction, garbage collection, and all sorts of legitimate businesses built on their illicit businesses. You make a lot of money from extortion, blackmail, narcotics, murder, and then you invest it into a legitimate business. Look at the Teamsters back in the day. They were controlled by the mafia.

The cartels are no different. They’re in the avocado business. They’re in a tequila business. They’re in construction. They’re in entertainment. They’re in resorts. They own part of Acapulco. They’re divesting. They think, “We’re making a lot of money, so let’s control everything. Let’s control all the markets, and then we’ll get a piece of everything coming in, which will increase our fortune and our profit portfolio.”

Again, they’re thinking like a structured Fortune 500 company by divesting and bringing in additional resources, which get funneled into narcotics and human trafficking. Concerning the human organ trade, the cartels are in that a little bit. They’re into the sex trade. Children are disappearing and people are disappearing in Mexico every day. Where are they going?

There is no accountability whatsoever. With the cartels, people just think they are all about narcotics. But we have to think in a broader sense, if we really want to understand how they operate. What is it going to take to mitigate the threat they represent to the United States?

Mr. Jekielek:
Once you’re into one extremely illicit area, you almost could get into almost anything. You have the network set up to move things.

Mr. Brown:
Anything that will generate a profit within the legal marketplace is attractive to the cartels. If you were to go down to Mexico and set up a big factory that was producing widgets, and you were sending them all over the world, you most likely would get a knock at your door from either the Sinaloa cartel or the CJNG cartel saying, “We’d like to invest in your business, and this is why it’s in your best interest.”

Then they would become a 50 percent partner, if not more, in your business, and then eventually take it over. That’s how they have managed to metastasize throughout the legal business community in Mexico and increase their ability to control the actual governmental operations of the country.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned Chinese money laundering operations. How does the money part work once these drugs are sold? Presumably you have to deal with the money in some kind of illicit way.

Mr. Brown:
Let’s go back to my associate that worked for the Sinaloa cartel. He’s making between four and twelve million a month. He would package it up and send it all back to Mexico. It was bulk cash hidden in tractor trailer trucks, containers, or other commercial items going back into Mexico. He says in the 12 years that he was sending bulk shipments back to Mexico, he never lost one shipment.

Even when I was working at the DEA, we knew that the bulk cash was being sent directly back to Mexico. We saw very little seizures at the border, because the inspections on items going into Mexico are not as strict as things coming out of Mexico. Moving forward to today, the cartel said, “Look, we need a better way. We’re making so much money. We need an alternative method to complement bulk cash shipments, something that’s more secure and has less risk.”

They turned to the Chinese who really have become the global money laundering organizations—the go-to guys for every criminal organization in the world. They have set up extensive money laundering networks from Bitcoin to utilizing mirror transactions and other methodologies where the cash never has to move locations. If you make a million dollars in Chicago, you call your Chinese money laundering operation and give them a million dollars. They take a three percent tax on that.

They then take that million dollars, split it up, and give it to several of their Chinese associate legitimate businesses. Those businesses put that money into the U.S. accounts. They then wire that million dollars from their accounts in China back to the trafficker in Mexico. The trafficker gets it from his Mexican bank and his money is then washed.

The Chinese have set up these businesses where they can launder hundreds of millions of dollars in this way without the cash ever moving. It’s really an old school Hawala system where you would give a guy $100 and he would send it to a Hawala broker in Pakistan. That individual takes money from his account and then gives it to your relatives or whoever was supposed to get the cash. Your $100 never left America. It’s just a way of operating within the system.

But in my opinion, given the fact that the cartels are making hundreds of millions of dollars more than they were in the 1990s, there is still a large amount of bulk cash being shipped back into Mexico. U.S. law enforcement was missing it and not seeing that cash. The only reason that drug traffickers exist is to make money.

Mr. Jekielek:
There has been a war on drugs for a very long time. Obviously, there have been some successful captures, but what has been seized is probably one percent of the amount. It’s hard to fathom the scale of the problem.

Mr. Brown:
That’s such a complicated question. I don’t know if we have enough time to really go into all the details. Where do we start with that question? Let’s talk about America’s addiction to narcotics. You can go back to the 1920s or 1930s when cocaine was legal, heroin was legal, and America saw people becoming addicted to those substances.

It was in your Coca-Cola. Your dentist would use it. Your doctors would use it. The medical community started to notice that cocaine and heroin have some addictive qualities that may not be good, so they were made illegal. But at that point, the hook was already in, and people knew the experience of addiction. It continued to move from the upper class to the middle class to the lower class.

As time progressed, narcotics became an easy out for people suffering from extreme psychological trauma, poverty, or lack of education. The driving force is for escapism. People turned to heroin, especially within the inner city communities of black and brown people who suffer more extensively from all of the above conditions, perhaps more than other groups.

You see pockets of severe addiction in black communities in Chicago, in L.A., in Oakland, in Washington, D.C., in New York City, and in Baltimore. From there, it just ballooned out. Then came fentanyl which crossed all racial barriers. It went from heroin users in the inner city, to kids in the suburbs who were taking the pills, to people who are having difficulties paying their bills. Fentanyl is the one narcotic that has crossed the racial barrier and now affects everybody.

Mr. Jekielek:
Oxycontin played a role here as well. At least that’s the conventional wisdom.

Mr. Brown:
Absolutely. It played a major role because it targeted a whole new paradigm of prescription drug users. Prior to Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma, it was heroin and that was affecting inner city communities of color. Of course, the Oxycontin addiction was in existence for almost 12 or 13 years, and people were getting addicted and they were dying from overdoses of Oxycontin, but then Purdue Pharma got caught. Doctors are no longer handing out free prescriptions and people are getting cut off.

As I said before, you’re used to getting 36 pills a week or a month. Now, you’re only getting six. But that’s not going to work, because that individual is already addicted to the qualities of Oxycontin. We know that Oxycontin is very close to heroin synthetically. The natural progression is that if you can’t get your Oxycontin, you will go to a heroin dealer to get a couple of grams. Then you will experience the same euphoric feeling from using heroin.

The cartels saw the effect when fentanyl was coming into the United States for a number of years. Then the State Department worked with the Chinese government and restricted fentanyl shipments to the U.S. We saw a dramatic decrease in the fentanyl being shipped directly from China to the United States. It created a vacuum. At the same time, we saw Oxycontin being regulated.

That is when the cartel saw an opportunity. They sat back and said, “There’s something to this fentanyl thing. Now that it’s being regulated in the United States, we can fill that void, get the precursor chemicals and ship it into the United States. We grab all those Oxycontin prescription drug users and bring them to our side.” That’s exactly what they did. In terms of a Machiavellian business strategy, it was executed with extreme precision.

Mr. Jekielek:
The export of fentanyl and its precursors by the Chinese regime is seen as a form of drug warfare against America. Do you view it that way?

Mr. Brown:
You would certainly have to ask the question or it would be willful blindness. Does the Chinese government know what’s going on? Absolutely. How do we know that? It is because the DEA specifically told them. “Here are a dozen investigations on individuals and Chinese companies which have been indicted in the U.S. courts. Here are the case files. Here’s the information. Will you help us mitigate this problem?”

Initially, in 2018, the Chinese government signed an agreement saying, “Yes, we will decrease or eliminate the ability of organizations to ship fentanyl directly to the United States.” But the Chinese government knew the cartels were going to simply come in and fill that void. Then the pushback from the Chinese government was, “We’re selling chemicals which are not regulated to the Mexican government, so it’s not our problem. You will have to go to Mexico and ask them.”

The Chinese government knows that cartel members are buying chemicals from China, producing fentanyl, and then selling it in the United States. In terms of complicity, yes, they know about it. Are they actually involved in assisting it? That’s a question for someone else. But certainly their willful blindness, in my opinion, is a criminal act. They’re culpable for the deaths of 100,00 people.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are very specific precursors that are used for fentanyl production. But there are more general-use chemicals that are now being used for fentanyl production.

Mr. Brown:
This is what I call the evolution of narcochemistry. For years, the production of methamphetamine required essential chemicals such as ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, methylamine, or P2P. Then suddenly, those chemicals became very hard to get, then became restricted. Years ago, the cartels got their best chemists to find out how to replicate the essential precursors by using unregulated or dual-purpose chemicals. They came up with a number of formulas where they could use unregulated chemicals.

That means chemicals that could be used for paints, for thinners, for acids, and for industrial pesticides. You’re talking about an unlimited amount of unregulated chemicals. If you have the right chemists who can reformulate and make a stage-one preliminary precursor, that makes a stage-two precursor, that makes the final precursor of ephedrine and methylamine or P2P, you could be two or three stages removed from having to order the illicit chemicals.

Now, this represents a very serious problem, because how do you regulate something that can’t be regulated? How do you track what’s being shipped from China to Mexico under false pretenses? Last year there was an 88 metric ton seizure of glycine acetic acid, which can be used to make a number of things. But when the Mexican government looked into it, the owner said, “We didn’t order it and we don’t know what it’s for.” It turns out that acetone can be used to make methamphetamine.

Part of your investigation has to be due diligence. When the Mexican government is looking at new precursors coming in or dual purpose chemicals coming in, part of that investigation has to be, “Are these legitimate orders? Who’s doing it? Who’s the owner? Let’s go talk to who ordered this shipment. Is this a legitimate shipment? Is it going to be utilized for a legitimate purpose?”

I’ll give you an example. In the United States, after the Oklahoma City bombing, if you try and go buy 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate, you’re going to get a knock on your door by an ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] agent, saying, “Why do you need 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate?” Ammonium nitrate now is heavily, heavily restricted. If you want to use it, you have to have a specific purpose to use it. That’s the way we’re going to have to go if we want to break the precursor chemical supply chain. But that will require an enormous effort on the part of all the governments.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you think about President Bukele’s approach in El Salvador, who has their drug problem under control?

Mr. Brown:
He’s got the gang problem under control. The gang problem led to the drug problem. For many years, all the Presidents before him, attempted to deal with the gang culture with a more democratic process. They tried to use the rule of law; investigate, arrest, prosecute, and convict. But the gang culture and criminal culture in Latin America is 100 times more violent than it is in the United States. If we look back to the days of Pablo Escobar, the Cali cartel, the Gulf cartel, those were extremely violent cartels who didn’t hesitate to kill police officers, judges, and reporters. We see that same culture in Mexico and Central America.

President Bukele said, “Look, we have to move towards a draconian methodology of law enforcement. We’re going to arrest all the gang members. We’re going to strip them down to their shorts and we’re going to line them up. We are going to be as draconian as necessary to regain stability in our culture.” Within the last couple of years their homicide rate dropped significantly. Drug trafficking also dropped significantly.

A country that used to have one of the highest murder rates in the world, now has one of the lowest murder rates in the world. You may challenge the methodology, but you have to also look at the results. If a culture is pushed to the brink of destruction, at what point do we change policies in order to regain stability and security?

Mr. Jekielek:
We are talking about solutions. You mentioned the first thing that we have to deal with is this crisis of addiction. What methods have worked in dealing with addiction?

Mr. Brown:
If you have a water main break in your house and it’s flooding your house, you can either try and save all your furniture and everything first, or you can deal with the leak. Which is going to be more beneficial? You say, “I’m going to fix the leak because the water is coming in. I cannot fix the house.” I see the same thing with narcotic addiction. We’re spending a lot of money and time on drug rehabilitation and harm reduction, which are all good things.

But we’re not spending adequate time addressing the root cause of the problem, which is the precursor chemicals coming from China, to some degree, India. The root cause is also the ability of cartels to freely operate clandestine laboratories, mass produce millions of fentanyl pills, and then simply move those across the border and distribute them into the United States.

Currently, there is a surplus of fentanyl pills in America. The surplus is driving increased addiction rates because now fentanyl pill prices are going down, and drug usage is going up. Addiction rates are going up. For drug treatment, any expert will tell you it will take maybe four to five years to complete a drug treatment program. How are you going to have a four to five year drug treatment program for millions of individuals who suffer from severe drug addiction?

Then once you get them successfully treated, what do you do with them? They’re going to go right back into the environment that got them hooked onto narcotics in the first place. It’s not just enough to deal with the narcotic addiction. What are we doing to address lack of education, poverty, unemployment, emotional trauma, stress, and mental illness?

What are we going to do to address those aspects in order to reduce addiction? I believe that we are past the point of no return in terms of reducing addiction with what is coming into the country in terms of narcotics. That means until we can reduce the supply chain, we’re not going to be able to reduce the addiction rate.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are many areas that need to be fixed.

Mr. Brown:
Yes, you need to have a strategy that is multifaceted. If we talk about the center of gravity, it is China. It’s the largest security state in the world. China, according to the State Department, is our number one adversary in the United States. They’re credited with stealing millions, if not billions of dollars in intellectual property. They spy on America and they’re involved in espionage against America. Is it really a far stretch to understand that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is aware of the cartel’s relationship with their precursor chemical industry?

They are simply thinking to themselves, “We’re not directly involved, so let it happen. We’ll just sit back. If it happens to deteriorate the moral and ethical fabric of America, that’s to our benefit.” It is what some people call their 100-year strategy, which is winning a war without actually going to war. “They say, To create an enemy from within, we’ll use a proxy. We’ll use the cartels to do that, and then our hands are clean. We’re just legitimately selling chemicals to another country. If you have a problem, you have to deal with Mexico.”

That is how China is stepping back and saying that it’s not their problem, when they directly know they are causing the issue. Until you can really deal with that center of gravity, that starting point in the supply chain, which is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, you’re going to have to focus on Mexico. If that’s impossible or very difficult to deal with, then you’re going to have to look at how narcotics are being smuggled into our country. That has to become the focal point for our mitigation strategy.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is new leadership in Mexico. What are her prospects of dealing with the cartel situation?

Mr. Brown:
You’re referring to President Scheinbaum, the first female president of Mexico, from the same party that former President Obrador was part of. She understands the playing field very well. The Sinaloa cartel and the CJNG cartel are extremely violent. She does not want to launch Mexico into an extended war with the cartels.

Her approach will be as it is now, working on the precursor chemicals, making some arrests, and engaging with the U.S. embassy and the DEA to some extent. But will it be as robust as it needs to be to degrade that precursor chemical supply chain and the clandestine laboratory operations? That has yet to be seen, because it is still very early on in her presidency.

Mr. Jekielek:
What would be the single most effective policy prescription that would cut into this whole process?

Mr. Brown:
The trilateral level approach with China and Mexico in the last decade has been ineffective in reducing the precursor chemical supply chain, and the production of methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine, which then comes into the United States. On the other hand, looking at the harm reduction, progressive drug treatment policies, they cannot happen fast enough to keep up with the rate of addiction. To me, you have to go to the nearest center of gravity where the United States has 100 percent control, and that’s the U.S. border.

We know that 98 percent of all the narcotics coming into the United States are transported in vehicles and commercial cargo that come across the United States. The vulnerability for the cartels is their cross-border transportation network. Of course, for the United States, that is hugely complex, because tens of thousands of cars come across the border every day. You would need to increase the technological capability of Customs and Border Protection. You would almost have to put a limit on the number of vehicles that can come into the United States on a daily basis. That number would have to be 100 percent inspected.

I use the example of the TSA [Transportation Security Administration] at the airport. The TSA would never say, “OK, nobody has to go through a scanner. Just get on the plane.” That would never happen. You will have to wait in line for three days before you can get on a plane, and everybody has to go through a scanner. If it slows up the process, then it slows up the process. If we really want a mitigating effort that’s going to work in reducing the enormous supply of fentanyl into the United States, we have to look at the means of distribution, and that’s cross-border traffic.

Another area which is very controversial in the United States, depending on which state you’re in, is the progressive harm reduction policies. In New York City, they have two locations which are called safe injection sites. Those are locations where substance users can go into with their narcotics, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, whatever they’re using, and they can use their narcotics in a safe environment, get clean needles, and then the administrative staff will supervise their usage. If they overdose, then they will be given Narcan and brought back to life.

Those two locations in New York have reversed overdoses by roughly 2,500, maybe 3,000 in the last two years. That’s 3,000 people that most likely would have died from an overdose if not for the safe injection sites. Again, looking at long term addiction, what do these locations actually do? They’re not involved in rehabilitative methodology, but they’re simply giving users a place or substance users a place where they can, “safely use dangerous narcotics,” It reduces the probability of a death from an overdose.

Then again, when I look at the neighborhoods these are in, both these centers are in low income neighborhoods of communities of color, which already have a drug usage problem. Now, you have more substance users setting up camp in already impoverished areas and increasing drug trafficking. Drug dealers will come to these areas and sell more narcotics to drug users, because they know drug users now have a safe place. Less people are dying, which means more people can buy the narcotics. That’s one issue we need a national debate on. Is this really the way forward?
The other issue in New York City is the new vending machines providing free Narcan and free needles, which arguably provide positive results. But they also supply heat-resistant, crack cocaine smoking pipes and smoking kits. Those are to reduce the harm to individuals smoking crack cocaine with glass pipes. Glass pipes break under heat and will cut the lips. In order to reduce the harm of smoking crack cocaine with a glass pipe, they can now get a heat resistant pipe from the vending machine.

The first day that they were filled, within hours, the machine was empty. One crack user was quoted as saying, “I’m just trying to get high, not die.” In that sense, the crack cocaine vending machine has been a success among crack users. It does nothing to reduce the harmfulness in using crack cocaine, which is extremely addictive, and destroyed many inner city communities from early 1990 through 1999. Now, we’re seeing a resurgence of crack use because now you can get a pipe that’s safe to use.

Again, I have an issue with these progressive harm reduction policies. I do support harm reduction. I support meeting the user where he or she is at. I support applying the methodology that actually reduces the harm of using narcotics. To me, that’s getting people to stop using narcotics. How we do that is another conversation. Providing them with the tools to use narcotics safely is not what I call the off-ramp to long term narcotic addiction.

Mr. Jekielek:
People that have come out of addiction have said the only reason they are alive is because someone came in and staged an intervention. They say that someone cared enough to help them stop.

Mr. Brown:
I’ve spoken to a number of former substance users and they’ll tell you that they’re never completely cured of the addiction. They realize that. Many of them said that if they hadn’t got arrested and gone to jail and not given access to narcotics, that they would be dead today. But we’re talking about a very small percentage of individuals who have the internal strength to hit bottom and bounce back up and go through an addiction process on their own. If we did that to the majority of people, they would not survive.

We need a different and more humanitarian approach to decreasing drug addiction that doesn’t enable continued long term drug addiction. It’s hard to call it harm reduction, when we’re not really reducing the harm. We’re actually enabling greater long term harm, but reducing the probability of death from an overdose. It’s kind of an oxymoron when you really get into it. What we’re trying to do really gets all tangled up.

Mr. Jekielek:
This has been a great conversation. Michael, any final thoughts as we finish up

Mr. Brown:
Again, we need to increase our education awareness. We need to make sure we’re hitting those states which are experiencing higher than usual overdose fatality rates related primarily to fentanyl usage.

Mr. Jekielek:
Michael Brown, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Brown:
Thank you for the invitation.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.