As the nation's opioid crisis worsens, authorities are confronting a resurgent, unruly player in the illicit trade of the deadly drugs, one that threatens to be even more formidable than the cartels: the Internet.
In a growing number of arrests and overdoses, law enforcement officials say, the drugs are being bought online. Internet sales have allowed powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl -- the fastest-growing cause of overdoses nationwide -- to reach living rooms in nearly every region of the country, as they arrive in small packages in the mail.
Authorities have been frustrated in their efforts to crack down on the trade because these sites generally exist on the dark Web, where buyers can visit anonymously using special browsers and make purchases with virtual currencies like bitcoin.
The problem of dark Web sales appeared to have been stamped out in 2013, when authorities took down the most famous online marketplace for drugs, known as Silk Road. But since then, countless successors have popped up, making the drugs readily available to tens of thousands of customers who would not otherwise have had access to them.
Among the dead are two 13-year-olds, Grant Seaver and Ryan Ainsworth. They died last fall in the wealthy resort town of Park City, Utah, after taking a synthetic opioid known as U-47700 or Pinky. The boys had received the powder from another Utah teenager, who bought the drugs on the dark Web using bitcoin, according to the Park City police chief.
"It's unimaginable that Grant could gain access to a drug like Pinky so easily, and be gone so quickly, poof," said Jim Seaver, Grant's father. "The pain and brutality of this tragedy is crippling."
Largely because of their potency, synthetic opioids have become the fastest-growing cause of the overdose epidemic, overtaking heroin in some areas. Just a few flakes of fentanyl can be fatal.
Their deadly efficiency also makes them ideal for sale online. Unlike heroin and prescription painkillers, which are relatively bulky, enough fentanyl to get nearly 50,000 people high can fit in a standard first-class envelope.
Online drug markets first gained attention six years ago with the rise of Silk Road, the online market created by Ross Ulbricht. Ulbricht was arrested, and the site was taken down in late 2013, but imitators quickly proliferated.
No federal agencies have released data on the prevalence of drugs ordered online. But the leading sites are doing far more business than the original Silk Road, according to findings by Rand Europe and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
Authorities say these markets account for a small proportion of the overall traffic in most drugs, including heroin and cocaine. But when it comes to synthetic opioids, many authorities tracking the traffic say that dark Web markets have quickly assumed a more prominent role.
The dark Web "has become such an important source of distribution for this sort of deadly drug," said Kathryn Haun, who was a prosecutor in San Francisco until last month, and the Justice Department's first digital currency coordinator. "It has enabled distribution channels that previously didn't exist."
As of Friday, the leading dark Web market, AlphaBay, had more than 21,000 listings for opioids and more than 4,100 for fentanyl and similar drugs, from dozens of dealers large and small. Many of those individual listings are like items in a catalog, representing an endless backroom supply of pills, powders and nasal sprays.
The social forums on AlphaBay and other sites are filled with conversations about how potent the drugs are, with frequent mentions of trips that ended up in emergency room visits or blackouts.
"I was injecting slowly got 1/3rd of the hit in, next thing i know i wake up with 3 paramedics above me," a user named AgentOrange 007 wrote in a forum posting on AlphaBay. "If i hadn't been found because i was making a loud snoring sound (tongue rolled back in my throat) i'd be dead no doubt."
Court documents show that in the past year, there have been more than two-dozen arrests of American drug dealers who were operating significant operations buying or selling synthetic opioids online, most of which were tied to specific overdose deaths.
In one arrest, in February, a man in South Carolina was accused of receiving more than 6.5 pounds of fentanyl ordered online -- or enough to kill 1.5 million adults, given that just 2 milligrams is a lethal dose.
Law enforcement officials investigating these cases say that public documents underrepresent the number of cases involving the dark Web because many court documents don't mention the online sources of the drugs.
And many cases -- including the death last year of musician Prince from a fentanyl overdose -- are still being investigated because of the relatively recent advent of the phenomenon.
"It has come to play a key role in the overdose crisis," said Tim Plancon, who oversees the Drug Enforcement Administration in Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio, states at the epicenter of the overdose crisis. "It's expanded beyond just your traditional drug smuggling and trafficking. There is just a lot more involved with it when you are dealing with folks on the dark Web with virtual currencies."
A Section on 06/11/2017