Tracking a Killer

“With the aim of deciphering all the aspects of a global problem, EL PAÍS has followed the trail through eight cities, three countries and two continents, tracking the most effective serial killer of American adults between 18 and 49-years-old. It murders them more than traffic accidents and firearms.” Right about the time the US states started to legalize marijuana, the DEA was cracking down in opiate-dealing pill mills. That presented a market opportunity to drug cartels that sidelined the weed business in favor of meeting the new demand for fentanyl. The network has gone global and the drug keeps getting stronger and more deadly. Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer. “It’s a trip with stops in the slums where drug traffickers cook fentanyl and in the ports along the Pacific, corroded by corruption. It examines the propaganda machinery of Beijing and the Washington offices where the strategists behind a losing war are at work. It sneaks across the border with Mexico — where, in 2022, the authorities seized 370 million lethal doses, more than enough to kill the entire population of the world’s leading power — and climbs the roads along which the trucks take it, hidden among bean jars, to the streets of Philadelphia or San Francisco, the two cities that top the rankings for fentanyl deaths in the world.”