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I Get My Peache Our in Georgia, I Get My Weed From California. But I Don't Get My Meds in Mexico

A UCLA-led study provides the first scientific evidence that brick and mortar pharmacies in Northern Mexican tourist towns are selling counterfeit pills containing fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine. These pills are sold mainly to US tourists, and are often passed off as controlled substances such as Oxycodone, Percocet, and Adderall.

The pills are available without a prescription – potentially adding to the already high number of overdose deaths stemming from use of those potent drugs in Mexico and the US.

“These counterfeit pills represent a serious overdose risk to buyers who think they are getting a known quantity of a weaker drug,” said senior author Chelsea Shover, assistant professor-in-residence of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.



Although She's Not Really Ill, There's a Little Yellow Pill

Two new investigations from media outlets show the true scope of the issue when it comes to Mexican pharmacies selling drugs laced with illegal fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamines.

The Los Angeles Times in February reported that pharmacies in several northwestern Mexico cities were selling meth as Adderall, as well as fentanyl disguised as Percocet and other opioid painkillers. Now, after four more months of investigation, the publication says the problem is “much broader” than previously understood.

“It’s not just stray pills laced with dangerous substances,” the L.A. Times wrote, “but sometimes entire bottles that appear to be factory sealed.” And reporters with the newspaper found that it’s happening in tourist hot spots across the country: “from the California border to the Yucatán Peninsula and from the southernmost edge of Texas to the Pacific Coast.”

Times reporters purchased and tested 55 pills from 29 pharmacies in eight cities over five trips to Mexico. Of these, a little more than half were counterfeit. One-third of the opioid painkillers tested by journalists were fake, with most testing positive for fentanyl.

Meanwhile, Vice visited 30 pharmacies around Mexico’s coast, which are also popular with tourists, and found fake Adderall and oxycodone that tested positive for meth and fentanyl, respectively.

Many of the pills Vice bought came from bottles labeled entirely in English, with the words “Percocet” and “Painkillers Tablets Hydrocodone.”

“It’s an elaborate hoax,” Ben Westhoff, author of “Fentanyl Inc.,” told the publication. “Somebody went to the trouble of trying to imitate what they think prescription pill bottles are supposed to look like to a U.S consumer, and although they missed the mark by a lot, these bottles do have half an air of legitimacy and certainly a lot more than handing someone a baggie of pills.”

Although federal health law states that purchasing opioids or benzodiazepines requires a special prescription issued by Mexico’s Health Ministry, this law was flouted across the coast, Vice wrote, noting that it was only the major pharmacy chains that refused to sell reporters the pill without a proper prescription.