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This package is just leaving a warehouse in China. It's roughly 15 by 20 cm in size and about a kilo in weight. The label says dog food, but inside is a fine white powder. It's the core ingredient for one of the deadliest drugs in the world, fentinyl. Cheaper than heroin and about 50 times as strong. An amount this small is enough to kill you. In the US, fentinyl has become the number one source of death for adults under 50, surpassing cancer, heart disease, and car accidents. How can its ingredients just move freely across continents, shipped, sorted, and delivered like an ordinary online order? Behind it lies a billiondoll system run by cartels, fueled by global trade, and enabled by broken regulations. A deadly supply chain hiding in plain sight. This is how fentinyl is trafficked. [Music] If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use, help us out there. Visit findtreatment.gov for support in the US or check these platforms to find international resources near you. All links are in the description. Also, this video is partly based on this incredible Reuters investigation. You'll find the link in the description as well. This is fentinyl. It's been used in medicine since the 1960s, mostly as a painkiller. Today, it's also applied as an anesthetic. Its effect is insanely strong, around 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin. It's also extremely addictive. Over the last 15 years, the illegal fentinel trade in the US has fueled an unprecedented synthetic opioid crisis. and the impact can be seen across the entire country. The biggest problem is that the substance is highly lethal. The number of deaths by fentinyl overdose in the US has exploded over the last few years. About 75,000 people died in 2023 alone. In total, fentinyl and other synthetic opioids have killed nearly half a million Americans between 1999 and 2022. One reason for this death toll is a process called lacing. Dealers consciously mix fentinyl into other street drugs like heroin to stretch supplies and boost their profits. A little fentinyl goes a long way, but that also means users get hooked faster and are much more likely to overdose not knowing what they are consuming. For those who traffic it, fentinyl has another major upside. It's synthetic. That means it's incredibly cheap and easy to produce. The business is so profitable that Mexican cartels have massively shifted to fentinil over the last few years. Instead of cultivating huge poppy fields for heroin, they can simply fabricate the drug in a lab, receiving the base ingredients by mail. Most of the packages moving down the conveyor belts in China are carrying everyday goods, chargers, clothes, dog food. But hidden among those thousands of boxes are the ingredients for fentinel. This little box is just one of countless packages going out of China every day. For efficient transportation, shipping companies bundle individual packages into what's known as a master carton. Master cartons are a cornerstone of global trade. Shipping one big box is cheaper and much more efficient than sending numerous small ones to the same destination. The master cartons are then stacked onto pallets with other bug shipments and the tiny fentinel precursor package ends up tucked deep inside. Then the master cartons are often loaded onto a plane and flown to their real destination, the United States. There's something about taking flight, getting that bird's eye view, seeing how small details connect to a much bigger system. Perspective matters. Whether you're trying to understand global trade, piece together a true crime story, or really understand a complex idea, you need to look at things from different angles, that's what Brilliant helps you to do. The hands-on learning platform helps you become a better thinker with thousands of interactive lessons in math, science, data analysis, AI, and more. Whether you want to understand how algorithms work, start coding, or build sharper logical thinking, the courses on Brilliant start with the foundations and guide you step by step toward focused and meaningful learning. For example, they've got a great course on logic that helps you stretch your analytic muscles. You're connecting dots, drawing conclusions, and thinking clearly under pressure. You solve puzzles using limited clues, break codes, and even train logical robots. It's hands-on brain stretching stuff. Head to brilliant.org/varn and try everything Brilliant has to offer for a full 30 days. Use this QR code or the link in the description to get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Global online shopping has seen a massive boom in recent years. Fentinel smugglers are riding that wave by sneaking their products into the vast international shipping stream and they're exploiting one particular loophole in the US. Back in the 1930s, Washington introduced a special customs regulation called the minimese. If a package is addressed to a private person and the goods inside are below a certain value, it skips costumes entirely. That means there are no duties and almost no detailed checks. Many countries have similar policies. In the European Union, the cutoff is €150. Anything above gets taxed. But the US has one of the most generous thresholds in the world. In 2016, the limit was raised from €200 to $800. Before that, some 134 million packages entered the country annually through this streamlined system. That number has jumped to nearly 1.4 4 billion units in 2024. This spike is also tied to the overall boom in global trade. But still about 90% of all goods coming into the US are duty-free deminimous imports. Until April 2025, most of these packages came from China, usually by air. Our box has had a long flight and finally touches down at LAX. Its first stop in America is a special customs warehouse. Examining every package that comes through here would be impossible. So, customs officers rely on spot checks. Specially trained dogs sniff out selected packages for fentinel precursors. Sometimes it's the packages weight that raises suspicion. If it doesn't j with its description, the box gets flagged and pulled out for inspection. Flag packages are scanned by high-tech machines, opened for manual inspection, and sometimes even sent to an on-site chemical lab. And in some cases, custom officers will also attach electronic trackers to suspicious boxes to follow their trail. But given the sheer volume of packages coming in, only a tiny fraction ever gets checked. Most of them are simply waved through, including our package. It's just been cleared for the next leg of the trip, which means it has now officially entered the country. The master carton is unpacked at a distribution center. The smaller parcels are sorted by destination. The next leg of transport is handled by one of the regular US delivery firms. Our package still has a long road ahead. Its next stop is Mexico. The vast majority of elicit fentinel is manufactured here. It's first shipped to a US address near the Mexican border. That's when a new link in the supply chain takes over to handle the border crossing. The address is a private home. The tenant is an elderly man. Some products can't be shipped to Mexico directly. This is where the man comes in. He's offering a personal crossber delivery to make some extra money, a common side hustle in the border region. People in Mexico can have their packages shipped to his US address. Then he drives them over in his private car. Now he's on his way to the border with a couple of boxes in the trunk. The package from China is one of them. The border works similar to the airport. Small boxes are rarely checked. The cartels are counting on that. The man in the car looks harmless. He doesn't even know what's in our package. He's waved through. The next stop is a distribution center in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Local freight carriers will forward the packages to the addresses supplied by their Mexican customers. And so our package reaches its final destination, a secret drug lab. This is where it's opened for the first time. The Sinalora cartel is one of the most powerful and violent criminal organizations in the world. With the fentinel boom in full swing, they too have shifted away from heroin production and gone allin on fentinel. Inside this old and nondescript house, two teenagers are working in a makeshift lab. They're cooking fentinel. They're not trained chemists. Someone just gave them a step-by-step tutorial. They open the package containing the powder from China and start prepping a new batch. It's complete routine. The process is always the same. Making fentinyl is almost as easy as baking cake. You don't need much gear either. Our 1 kilo package yields up to 50,000 doses of fentinyl. Now, the finished drug heads back to the US. It can cross the border in all kinds of ways. Attached to or even carried inside the bodies of so-called drug mules or disguised among regular cargo on some ordinary delivery van. Smugglers have hidden fentinel pills in candy bags soon them into clothing. And in some cases, drugs are even implanted into pets. They're simply betting on the fact that it's impossible for customs to check every person or item that crosses the border. More often than not, it's US citizens who drive the drugs across the border in their private cars. Sometimes they come up with clever hidden compartments like this one. The car is just minutes away from crossing. The driver can already see the custom officers up ahead with drugniffing dogs working car to car. He starts to get nervous, but just as they're coming toward him, the agents pull away. The dog needs a break. The stash in his car goes undetected. The driver exhales. And just like that, more fentinel made it into the US. In 2024 alone, nearly 10 tons of the drug were seized along the US Mexico border. But the amount that actually made it through is by all likelihood much higher. The fentinel crisis has also become a geopolitical flash point. The US accuses China of fueling the epidemic on purpose. Beijing, for its part, claims to have cracked down on the fentinel trade years ago. The real problem lies in controlling the precursors. They are much harder to regulate. Chemical suppliers in China are using false return labels and deceptive packaging to conceal their illegal business with fentinel precursors. Washington has even talked about a new opium war. In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate duty-free deminimous imports from China and Hong Kong. He cited the ongoing health emergency posed by fentinel trafficking as one of the reasons for the high tariffs on Chinese goods. China denies the accusations. Beijing says the crisis is completely made in the US and therefore the sole responsibility of the American government. Meanwhile, Trump has also accused Mexico of not doing enough to crack down on the drug cartels. Curbing the international fentinel trade is extremely difficult. The drug has long made its way beyond North America and reached places like Europe. Probes in several German cities have shown that fentinyl is already being mixed into street heroin. Getting off fentinel without medical support is extremely hard, if not almost impossible. And as long as it can be produced and trafficked so easily, the business will keep booming.