Tracing Fentanyl from Source to Sidewalk

Fentanyl doesn’t arrive in America the way most people imagine. There’s no single point of origin, no finished product crossing a border in a shipping container. It’s assembled in pieces, a legal chemical here, a logistics network there, a pill press in a garage somewhere else. And it kills in pieces too, one counterfeit pill at a time, often without the person who swallowed it ever knowing what they took.

Three people carry a piece of this story, each shaped as much by what they’ve lived through as what they’ve studied or trained for.

Jeff DaRin is a Strategic Growth Lead at Vannevar and a retired Deputy Assistant Director for International Operations at Homeland Security Investigations, where he spent 32 years in federal and local law enforcement, including helping build DHS’s initial counter-fentanyl strategy.

Bill Alexander is Chief Executive Officer of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, with nearly 30 years of law enforcement experience that took him from the U.S. Air Force Security Police to command of the Prince George’s County Police Department’s Training and Education Division. There, he oversaw the department’s police academy and was responsible for training the next generation of officers.

And Jaime Puerta is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Co-Founder and President of Victims of Illicit Drugs (VOID), and Co-Chair of Project Facing Fentanyl, the organization behind National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day. His 16-year-old son, Daniel, died from a counterfeit pill in 2020, and Jaime has since dedicated his life to making sure other families never get that same call. Together, their three accounts trace one supply chain from its source to a sidewalk.

A Different Kind of Drug

For years, the U.S. treated fentanyl like cocaine, as a finished product moving along fixed smuggling routes, best stopped by seizing shipments and making arrests. That model made sense for cocaine, grown, processed, and shipped in final form from South America.

Fentanyl doesn’t work that way, and Jeff has spent years explaining why. “The pre-precursor chemicals are completely legitimate industrial products,” he says. “That’s what makes this so hard. There’s no illegality to flag at the source. You have to dig into the paperwork, the corporate registries, the beneficial ownership records, to find the illegitimate company or the nefarious use behind an otherwise legal shipment.” Intermediate chemicals are synthesized into immediate precursors. Those precursors then move onto labs in Mexico and increasingly Canada, where they are combined to produce fentanyl. Often it isn’t even pressed into a pill until it’s already inside the United States.

Bill sees the same shift, but from a vantage point few people have, across nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. “A decade ago, an overdose call was tragic, but it was contained to one scene, one department,” he says. “Now we’re seeing the same fentanyl-related risk show up in departments everywhere, from major metro units to two-officer rural agencies. This isn’t isolated anymore. It’s systemic.”

Jaime, for his part, watched the drug arrive in a form nobody expected. “These are kids who thought they were taking a Percocet or a Xanax,” he says. “One pill is all it takes now.” All three agree that this is not the drug crisis anyone trained for.

Following the Chemical Upstream

Even though fentanyl doesn’t move like a finished product the way cocaine does, the people trafficking it often lean on the same logistics infrastructure and smuggling routes the cocaine trade already built, especially to move precursor chemicals into the labs where they’re needed. “We’re increasingly moving toward a network disruption model instead of an interdiction model,” Jeff explains. “You have to find the vulnerable nodes across the whole logistics chain, and the broker moving everything is usually the most exposed. They’re actual people doing traceable things, not a container you’re hoping to intercept.”

He points to an idea already partially in motion; DEA runs a Fentanyl Signature Profiling Program that chemically fingerprints seized fentanyl to link related seizures across the country. But that program lives inside DEA’s own labs, feeding intelligence reports back to DEA agents, not a resource that reaches the officer at a traffic stop or the detective working a local case. “That program exists, but it’s not built for the field,” Jeff says. “We need to take that same idea, chemical fingerprinting, pill markings, dyes, all of it, and turn it into something local and state agencies can actually plug into. Right now, if a department in Ohio and a department in Arizona seize pills with the same marking, there’s no guarantee anyone will ever connect those two dots.” Formalizing that connection, he argues, is what would let a single pill marking trace all the way back through the press that made it to the broker who moved it.

Jeff says speed is the underlying bottleneck. “The problem isn’t a lack of information anymore. It’s fusing what we already have quickly enough to do something with it.” That fusion work, turning scattered shipping records and corporate filings into a usable picture of a live network, is what eventually puts investigators in a position to act. But by the time a pill has crossed the border and reached a street corner, it’s no longer an investigator who meets it first. It’s an officer, and what happens at that moment looks very different depending on which department that officer belongs to.

What the National Picture Looks Like

Bill has spent his career watching law enforcement change from the inside, first as a patrol officer, then through command roles overseeing training and legislative liaison work, and now leading an organization built to honor fallen officers and make the profession safer nationwide. That vantage point shapes how he sees fentanyl, not as a single department’s problem, but as a nationwide pattern of uneven training, inconsistent protocols, and gaps in data-sharing that only becomes visible once you compare one agency to another.

“When you’re leading one department, you see your own scenes, your own numbers,” Bill says. “When you’re working across the country the way we do, you start to see something different, like fentanyl exposure incidents rising in departments that never used to log them, agencies without consistent protocols for handling unknown substances, and officers who never got trained for what a fentanyl-involved scene actually requires. That inconsistency is dangerous. It means an officer’s safety on a call can depend on which department badge they’re wearing.”

The risk isn’t hypothetical. Bill points to two officers who died years apart, in 2016 and in 2020, after being exposed to fentanyl while processing evidence in the line of duty. Their deaths are part of why he pushes so hard for consistent safety protocols across departments. Officers should not have to learn this lesson the hard way.

Part of Bill’s role now is closing that gap, pushing for consistent training standards, sharing best practices across departments that would otherwise never compare notes, and making sure officer safety programs keep pace with a threat that didn’t exist in the same form a generation ago. He also believes language matters. Training officers to ask whether they’re looking at a poisoning, not just an overdose, changes what gets documented on scene, and that shift feeds directly into better data collection and sharing across departments.

“An overdose isn’t just a medical emergency,” he says. “It’s also a data point. The markings on a pill, where it was purchased, what platform it came through. That information matters, and it only becomes useful once departments are capturing it the same way and sharing it. Right now, too much of that knowledge lives in one officer’s head or one department’s files instead of feeding into the bigger picture.”

For Bill, honoring the officers his organization memorializes and protecting the ones still on patrol are the same mission, viewed from two different angles. A well-trained, well-coordinated response protects the officer walking into a fentanyl-involved scene today, and it preserves the thread that leads investigators back into the network tomorrow.

It’s a thread that runs a long way, from a shipment to a lab to a press to a pocket. But it starts to matter most, and hurt the most, at the very last link, a family’s kitchen table.

The Downstream Impact

Everything changed for Jaime Puerta on the morning of April 1, 2020.

“That last night was special, one of those evenings you don’t forget. I called him downstairs, and I don’t even know what made me want to, but I just wanted to hug him. He came down and hugged me, and told me he was sorry for everything he’d put me through growing up. I told him not to worry about it. He was just a kid figuring things out, and he had a great future ahead of him. I told him how proud I was. He said goodnight, told me he loved me, and went up to bed.

“The next morning, around eight, I walked into his room and found him lying against the headboard, hands folded over his chest, eyes open, a faint blue tint on his lips. I screamed his name. I called the paramedics, they got him downstairs and started compressions, and we followed the ambulance to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. We waited. That evening, a doctor came in and told us Daniel wasn’t coming back, that the boy in that room was just a shell of who he’d been.

“He was supposed to graduate high school that year. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

“I’ve talked to thousands of parents since then, all over the country, and here’s what I tell every one of them. This is a choice between life and death. Drugs are more dangerous than ever before, there’s no room for experimentation because your child could end up being poisoned by illicit fentanyl. I never got the chance to have that conversation with Daniel before it was too late. You still have that chance. Take it.”

For Jaime, the most dangerous misconception isn’t about chemistry. It’s about how kids are accessing these pills. “People still picture a dealer on a street corner,” he says. “That’s not how it works anymore. In the past, there were different dealers for different drugs, and you’d find that individual to get what you wanted. Today, all it takes is a quick text and a meetup. Dealers have all the options, including many counterfeit pills, and they’re soliciting kids through social media apps and encrypted messaging services.”

Where We Go From Here

What begins as a global supply chain of chemicals and shipping routes ends as a local problem, showing up on a patrol officer’s call sheet and as a parent’s worst nightmare, sometimes in the same week. Each of them already has a clear sense of what needs to happen next, and each answer looks a little different depending on where they sit in the chain.

Jaime wants to see parents more engaged in their children’s online activity. His organization VOID has resources designed to help parents and educators with open dialogue about these dangers.

Bill would like to see prosecutors pursue stronger charges for possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, rather than continuing to treat it as an ordinary drug charge. He’s clear that law enforcement can’t arrest its way out of this problem alone. He’d also like to see continued national pressure on China to limit the sale and transfer of precursor chemicals.

For Jeff, the solution is getting better technology in the hands of law enforcement so they can disrupt the criminal networks facilitating the fentanyl supply chain and make communities safer for all Americans. Three jobs, three vantage points, all pointed at the same goal—saving lives.

To learn more about these authors and their organizations, please visit:
https://nleomf.org/
https://stopthevoid.org/
https://vannevarlabs.com/mission-areas/homeland-security/