Mariana van Zeller

not just of their own organizations, because in many cases they are organizations, but also of the drugs themselves.

They realized they started shipping fentanyl to the United States several years ago.

And we did a story about fentanyl when it was just starting.

So nobody in the U.S.

still knew what fentanyl was.

But because I had done a story on Oxycontin and then heroin, the progression from Oxycontin into heroin,

All my sources on the ground started telling me, hey, there's this new drug hitting the streets called fentanyl.

It's a pharmaceutical drug, but they're starting to exploit the pharmaceutical drug itself to get them high instead of in the medical treatment centers.

And the cartel suddenly has its hands on this.

So we went down to Mexico and interviewed a guy from the Sinaloa cartel.

He had a kilo, a brick of heroin, and it was mixed with fentanyl.

It was when it was still all heroin mixed with just a little bit of fentanyl, and then it reversed.

But he was telling us, hey, this just recently happened where we, the Sinaloa cartel, decided we were going to get in on this business.

And they had hired a Colombian chemist to come there.

And they paid him, I think, $40,000 or $50,000 for the Colombian chemist to teach them how to make fentanyl.

And it was the biggest bet.

And that's why the Sinaloa cartel grew so much.

They were the first in the fentanyl game.

And initially, they were just shipping white powder to the U.S., hidden in packages and whatnot.

But then they realized, wait, dealers and distributors in the U.S.