Fentanyl Overdoses Spike on Mexico’s Northern Border But Remain Invisible

When it landed three years ago, some six guys died here in one week,” says 51-year-old Roberto Prado, a homeless man who uses drugs and lives in a community of a few dozen beneath one of Tijuana’s canal bridges.

Until recently, people in Tijuana and other Mexican border cities who use heroin almost exclusively consumed the black tar form of the drug, originating from poppy-growing states such as Guerrero and Chihuahua. In 2018, local drug gangs seem to have switched en masse to trafficking “white” or “China white,” a synthetic powder that often contains the powerful painkiller fentanyl.

Fentanyl, its base chemicals usually imported from China, is much cheaper to produce than heroin, with a bigger profit margin for traffickers. The shift has gone hand in hand with a considerable spike in overdoses, say a dozen users and harm reduction activists interviewed by Filter in the border cities of Tijuana, Mexicali and Ciudad Juárez. 

In the face of what is by all accounts an emerging fentanyl crisis, people who use drugs encounter indifference or even outright hostility from both the general public and authorities. 

The bridge in Tijuana where Roberto Prado and his community live.

Beneath the bridge where Prado lives, as in other homeless encampments in these cities, the only recourse residents have is each other, or well-meaning activists with limited means. In Ciudad Juárez, ambulances are said to shy away from overdose calls. Police are often physically abusive with users and extort them for money. People who use drugs are often forced into rehab programs—only to emerge with lower tolerance and thus a higher risk of overdose.

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