Super-Potent Synthetic Opioids Spread Across US Amid Fentanyl Crackdown

This article was co-published with Signal Ohio and STAT.

In high school, Ashley Delgado dreamed of becoming a doctor and one day buying her father a Rolls-Royce. “She wanted to heal people,” said her father, James Taylor. She had a high GPA, Taylor added, and did especially well in science and Latin.

In her mid-20s, Ashley suffered a leg injury and was prescribed OxyContin. The painkiller marked the beginning of a yearslong descent through addiction — from prescription opioids to methamphetamine, then heroin, and finally, fentanyl.

With her family’s support, Ashley spent time in a rehabilitation facility in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and in recovery she moved into a sober living home. But on an early summer morning in 2023, Ashley’s body was found on a dead-end street just outside the city. One sandal was missing. Tucked inside her bra was a folded scrap of paper containing a tan powder. She was 29.

“I have lost my father, my grandmother — that hurts,” Taylor said. “But when you lose your child, that’s the worst thing on the planet, because they’re not supposed to go before you.”

Toxicology tests would later show a mix of substances in Ashley’s system, including protonitazene and metonitazene, powerful synthetic opioids from a little-known class of drugs known as nitazenes. Her death was ruled accidental.

Before his daughter’s fatal overdose, Taylor had never heard of nitazenes. Developed in the 1950s as potential painkillers, the drugs never reached the market because they were deemed unsafe for medical use. He was shocked to learn they could be up to 40 times more potent than fentanyl and 500 times stronger than heroin.

Nitazenes are predominantly sold online, both on the clear web and dark web, and are often laced into other substances to increase their potency. Experts say this puts unsuspecting users seeking more common drugs, such as oxycodone, fentanyl, or stimulants like cocaine, at risk of fatal overdoses.

The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) started tracking nitazene-related seizures around 2014, but it wasn’t until 2019 that it saw a marked increase. Since then, federal authorities have scheduled dozens of nitazenes as illegal substances, launched undercover operations, filed indictments, and imposed tariffs on China, where many of the laboratories manufacturing and supplying nitazenes and fentanyl are known to reside.  

Yet, figures provided to Bellingcat by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) show the United States has reported 26 different kinds of nitazenes since 2019 — the second highest number globally, after Canada.

And data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on nitazene-involved overdose deaths suggest that cases continue to rise. More than 1,100 fatalities have been confirmed through the CDC’s State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS), but experts believe the number of Americans who have died from them since 2019 could be as high as 2,000. 

Alex Krotulski, the director of the Centre for Forensic Science Research and Education in Pennsylvania, told Bellingcat that deaths are underreported because nitazenes were not routinely tested for.

“There are only limited forensic toxicology labs that test for nitazenes, so if a nitazene was present and the lab didn’t test for it, the number wouldn’t appear in SUDORS,” he said. “Also, for labs that do test for nitazenes, they have missed cases prior to their testing.” The most recent years for which there is CDC data, 2023 and 2024, show they were the deadliest, with 747 confirmed deaths.

In this months-long open source investigation, Bellingcat combed through dozens of criminal court proceedings, filed national, state, and county-level Freedom of Information requests, and obtained scores of medical examiner reports to produce the most detailed account yet of how nitazenes are infiltrating US borders and destroying lives. 

The investigation found that, despite efforts to curb their spread across the country, nitazenes are proliferating online. It also shows that, by the time nitazenes reach American users, they are almost always mixed with several other drugs, including methamphetamines, cocaine and, most notably, fentanyl. 

As of this year, 48 of 50 US states have reported nitazene seizures.

Less Fentanyl, More Nitazenes

Fentanyl is by far the biggest opioid killer in the US. With more than a quarter of a million deaths since 2021 and about 200 fatalities a day, fentanyl is one of the country’s most urgent public health crises. But drug experts warn that nitazenes can be even more potent and are being mixed with fentanyl and other substances, creating increasingly lethal combinations.

“We’re always concerned about fentanyl being mixed in with other drugs — cocaine, meth, heroin,” said Frank Tarentino, Associate Chief of Operations for the DEA’s Northeast Region. “You add nitazenes to that and it makes it exponentially more dangerous and frightening for drug law enforcement, parents, caregivers, educators, and the young.”

Data obtained from the DEA’s National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS) show reports of confirmed seizures of nitazenes rising sharply — from 43 positive tests in 2019 to almost 2,000 in 2024 (the most recent year for which figures are available). By March this year, more than 8,000 nitazene reports had been recorded since 2019. But experts said that not all laboratories can test for nitazenes — which come in many forms including powders, pills, and sprays — and many don’t feed into the NFLIS system, meaning these numbers are almost certainly an underestimate.

We asked the DEA for a breakdown of reports of nitazenes by state. Ashley Delgado’s home state of Ohio stands out. NFLIS data from 2019 to 2024 indicate that more than a third of all positive nitazene laboratory reports nationally are linked to Ohio. 

Separate data from the CDC shows Ohio has also recorded the highest number of nitazene-related overdose deaths in the US since 2021. In 2020, there were just four fatalities linked to the drug; in 2021 that number rose to 90. Between 2022 and 2024, according to government data, there were 200 more deaths.

“It is a risk to our community,” said AmandaLynn Reese, chief programme officer at Harm Reduction Ohio, a non-profit that supports people who use drugs. “There’s been several instances of nitazenes being reported within the community, and I think we’re going to see more of that, especially as we’re seeing less fentanyl.”

To learn more about what was happening in Ohio, Bellingcat filed a public records request for county-level figures to the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). The data shows that the counties of Scioto, Butler and Cuyahoga — areas long affected by the opioid crisis — account for almost half of all nitazene detections across the state, by weight.

In the 2000s, Portsmouth in Scioto County became known as the “pill mill capital” of America due to widespread overprescribing of opioids. More recent data continue to show Scioto with one of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the state. In Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, drug-related mortality rates tripled the national average in 2022. 

Two years ago, Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine issued executive orders to schedule nine different nitazenes and legalised the use of tools to test for drugs including nitazenes. 

The reasons why Ohio has been so hard hit are still not fully understood. “Ohio’s geography has long been a suspected contributing factor,” said Erin Reed, director of RecoveryOhio, a statewide initiative coordinating Ohio’s response to addiction. The organisation cited a 2001 article pointing to Ohio’s unique geographic and infrastructural features — including vast land, air and sea transportation networks — as key reasons for the state being a hub for drug trafficking. 

Local organisations like Harm Reduction Ohio are pushing for more drug-checking services, education, and greater accessibility to testing strips and life-saving medications like Naloxone, a drug that is used to reverse an opioid overdose. “People are going to use drugs,” Reese said. “We don’t know the supply, but those are ways you can engage in your drug use to increase safety and reduce harm.”

Dealer’s Choice

Bellingcat obtained medical examiner reports from Cuyahoga County for all nitazene-related deaths in 2023 and 2024, which provide an insight into how the drugs are being consumed. The autopsy records show that 45 people — 31 men and 14 women aged 29 to 72 — died after taking nitazenes over the two-year period. Among them were university graduates and former athletes, an Army veteran, an ironworker and an addiction counselor.  

Just before Christmas in 2024, a young man from Cleveland died after taking drugs that included etonitazene. A couple of weeks earlier, the body of an elderly woman was found in her home after she ingested drugs that included metonitazene and protonitazene. In the summer, a mother of two children in her thirties consumed a similar lethal mix. All except one of the 45 deaths was ruled accidental. 

And in every instance, nitazenes were detected alongside fentanyl, and often with a cocktail of other drugs such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines. The reason for this wide variety, Tarentino, the DEA agent said, is that dealers often mix nitazenes into other drugs to make them more powerful and addictive, and ultimately to give them a competitive edge. 

“It becomes a brand,” he said. “The unfortunate circumstance that we find ourselves in is that the dealer’s choice becomes a deadly decision.” Not only are these mixtures deadly — they can also be highly profitable. 

Court records analysed by Bellingcat show nitazenes have been sold at prices ranging from roughly US $4,000 to $12,000 per kilogram. But Tarentino said the DEA’s internal estimate puts $12,000 at the lower end of the range, with prices going up to as much as $40,000. Given their potency, even small quantities can be diluted into hundreds of thousands — or potentially millions — of doses once mixed and pressed into pills. “A little bit can go a long way,” Tarentino said, “and they can make a lot of money.”

A Freedom of Information Act request to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) revealed that in 2024 and 2025 — the only years for which the agency has monitored nitazenes separately — 41 consignments of the drug were intercepted. The data shows that most of these shipments arrived by mail, primarily from mainland China, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. The quantities tended to be small, ranging from less than 1 gram to almost 700 grams. 

But that’s not always the case. An analysis of US federal court records linked to prosecutions of nitazenes indicates that roughly 90 kilograms of material containing nitazenes in different forms (powder and pills) have been seized over the past three years. Nearly two-thirds of that amount, about 60 kilograms, stem from a single case.

In that case, prosecutors allege that a man named Valkar Singh drove a blue Maserati from Canada into the US carrying six industrial-sized buckets with more than 100,000 pills containing  isotonitazene. According to court filings, Singh transported the drugs to a Bronx, New York address, where he was arrested by undercover law enforcement officers. 

Tarentino, who is familiar with the Singh case but could not comment on it specifically, said a lot of work is being done to prevent drugs being smuggled across the Canadian border. “Canada has become a major concern, but also a major partner in trying to stop the synthetic opioids that are coming into the United States,” he said.

Lawyers for Singh, who has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing, declined to comment.

The scale of the alleged seizure makes this case an outlier. Of 46 federal cases identified by Bellingcat between 2021 and 2025, the next highest nitazenes seizure was about 9 kilograms. By comparison, data provided by the European Union Drugs Agency shows roughly 18 kilograms of nitazene-related seizures (pills, powder, liquid) across the EU between 2019 and 2023. 

“It’s very large,” said Jared Brown, scientific affairs officer at the UNODC. “One hundred thousand pills is probably at the limit of what we hear about in terms of maximum types of quantities that get seized.” 

The evidence suggests that most buyers are individual dealers who purchase relatively small quantities online, rather than organised criminal groups. “It’s street-level or mid-level dealers [in the US] that are introducing the nitazenes into the drug supply, not the big drug traffickers,” said Philip Berry, a visiting senior lecturer at King’s College London who formerly worked in counter-narcotics at the UK Home Office.

Court documents show that buyers can easily find nitazene suppliers online: on dark web marketplaces, standalone chemical supplier websites, or even on social media platforms. The suppliers often market the drugs by listing their chemical identifier and social media contact details. Often, the ads include an image of a young Asian woman striking a pose. 

Buyers are often individual dealers who contact sales representatives via encrypted channels and negotiate a deal. In those conversations, representatives will sometimes disclose how they claim to evade customs, for example by declaring the product as cosmetics or electronic accessories.

A detailed account that illustrates this modus operandi comes from the 2023 case against a man named Will Catis in Florida — the state with the second highest number of confirmed nitazene reports. Court documents show that a basic internet search led Catis to multiple nitazene advertisements listed by Jiangsu Bangdeya New Material Technology Co., LTD, a Chinese company sanctioned by the US Treasury for offering illicit substances for sale, including fentanyl and protonitazene.

Catis purchased approximately four kilograms of nitazenes from Jiangsu Bangdeya in batches no larger than 500 grams. The drugs were sent via the US Postal Service to Deerfield Beach, Florida. Once received, Catis mixed the nitazenes with other drugs, pressed the substance into a brick and sold it to other drug traffickers. Catis was jailed for 12 years after pleading guilty to possessing and intending to distribute nitazenes.  

One court case from Florida describes how a couple who lived in a converted garage bedroom in Hernando County bought nitazenes through the mail from Chinese companies they contacted online. Jacob Spinoza and his girlfriend Veronica Jo Barback regularly abused the drugs and distributed them locally, according to court documents. Both pleaded guilty. Spinoza was sentenced to nine years in prison, and Barback received a three-year sentence.

Another notable case reveals how a man allegedly ran a drug trafficking operation from a prison in Ohio. Investigators said Brian Lumbus Jr worked with a middleman, Giancarlo Miserotti, who contacted drug manufacturers in China to get nitazenes shipped through Italy to avoid custom checks. Once in Ohio, the plan was to distribute the drugs to other states, court documents said. 

But law enforcement agents were listening in on conversations between Lumbus and other members of the drug network, who expressed caution about the potency of nitazenes. “Man, we got to be careful … somebody died,” Lumbus said in one phone conversation, according to court documents. “Ohhh … it was too strong,” Miserotti responded. “I think the ratio of the pink [metonitazene] was thick.” 

Lumbus is awaiting trial. Miserotti was arrested in Italy in 2023 and sentenced to more than 13 years in prison. 

Arms Race

Enforcement actions have targeted the online marketplace ecosystem. In June 2025, Archetyp Market, a major dark web platform used to sell drugs, was dismantled in a coordinated operation involving Europol. US authorities have also indicted several China-based companies and individuals accused of offering nitazenes and related synthetic opioids for sale. Still, advertisements for nitazenes continue to litter online markets, constantly adapting to new regulatory regimes.

In July 2025, China placed the majority of nitazenes under national control. Tightened regulations — both in China and the US — have tried to stem the flow of nitazenes. But drug experts warn that manufacturers are already exploiting loopholes in China’s regulations by marketing chemically similar synthetic opioids known as “orphines.” 

Jared Brown, of UNODC, said orphines are also thought to come from China and are about as powerful as fentanyl. “Orphines have just enough of the molecule difference that it isn’t covered by the core definition that China has made,” he said. 

This is not the first time Chinese synthetic opioid manufacturers have adapted to regulations. In 2019, China banned all fentanyl-related substances, including some major precursors. The number of distinct fentanyl analogues reported to the UNODC subsequently plummeted, while reports of nitazenes quickly picked up. Now that China is clamping down on nitazenes, orphines are on the rise. More than 150 cases involving orphines were reported in the US between 2024 and 2025, the majority of which are in Illinois.

“Always adapting, always changing – we call them ‘shape shifters’,” said Tarentino. “They’re this global Hydra that are always changing, evolving and adapting to their environment and taking full advantage of all of these different loopholes and vulnerabilities that exist.”

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Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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