The pipeline of deadly fentanyl into the U.S. may be drying up, experts say

This summer, Dan Ciccarone, a physician and street drug researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, sent a team to gather data on the city’s streets in areas where illicit fentanyl has been a killer for years. They found something unexpected.

“The fentanyl supply is drying up for some reason,” Ciccarone said. “Hang out on the streets, talk to people — the drugs are hard to find and more expensive.”

When street fentanyl began spreading in the American street drug supply beginning in 2012, most experts believed the deadly synthetic opioid was unstoppable. Fentanyl is cheap, easy to make and hugely profitable. The black market supply chain that feeds U.S. demand for the drug is operated by some of the most sophisticated and ruthless criminal gangs in the world.

But Ciccarone said that over the past six months, he began hearing from street drug experts around the U.S. who also were seeing significantly less fentanyl and fewer overdoses.

“I head from Ohio, I heard from West Virginia, and I heard from Maryland and Arizona, and they’re all telling me the same thing: some sort of supply shortage on the street,” he said.

There are skeptics, people who question this trend, but some of the top drug policy analysts in the U.S., as well as experts with close ties to street fentanyl markets, believe the data shows a major disruption in the deadly fentanyl supply chain.

“It’s a development that many drug policy experts would not have imagined,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown at the Brookings Institution, who studies international criminal organizations that make and smuggle fentanyl.

She said drug gangs appear to be trafficking less fentanyl and are also “adulterating” or weakening the potency of the fentanyl being sold. “Everyone has been caught by surprise by the extent of the adulteration of fentanyl,” Felbab-Brown said. “And even more significantly by claims in certain places in the U.S. that there is not enough fentanyl available.”

Researchers generally agree there has been an “unprecedented” drop in fentanyl purity in some parts of the United States. Labs that test street fentanyl are finding it cut or watered down far more aggressively, often with an industrial chemical known as BTMPS.

An industrial chemical mixed into fentanyl

“We’ve had samples that were just BTMPS and not any fentanyl,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, an addiction researcher based in North Carolina who tests fentanyl samples collected from illicit drug markets around the country.

Edward Sisco, a research chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who helped analyze fentanyl samples, said it’s a mystery why drug gangs would use BTMPS in fentanyl mixtures. There’s no indication the substance causes users to get high.

“It’s commonly used to prevent UV degradation of plastics, and it has some other industrial uses as well,” Sisco said, adding that it appears the chemical is being added to fentanyl powders deliberately early in the supply chain, possibly in drug labs in Mexico.

“When something new comes into the drug market, it usually comes in one geographical location. It’s very uncharacteristic to see [BTMPS] show up all over the country at one time,” he said.

While BTMPS is considered toxic to humans, it doesn’t cause overdoses or immediate death.

Some drug policy experts believe these shifts in the fentanyl supply are factors in the sudden national decline in fentanyl-related deaths, which dropped by roughly 20% last year, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Dennis Cauchon, a harm reduction activist in Ohio, believes that pattern is visible in his state, where fatal overdoses have fallen even faster in 2024, down by roughly a third. “If you look at the share of fentanyl in Ohio’s drug supply, you can predict how many deaths there will be,” Cauchon said. “So the real question is, why has fentanyl declined?”

This question is being fiercely debated by drug policy and addiction experts.

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