An 18-liter jug of J.T. Baker acetic anhydride bought online, no questions asked, by a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter in Mexico.
Photographer: Jake Naughton for Bloomberg BusinessweekHeroin’s Hidden Ingredient Is a Chemical Made by U.S. Companies
A $324 jug of acetic anhydride, made in Mexico by a publicly traded American company, is enough to produce 90,000 hits of high-grade “China white.” The cartels are getting as much as they want, and also using it to cook meth.
Making their way down a narrow country road in the Mexican state of Sinaloa one morning in May 2019, members of a counter-narcotics squad were struck by a strong chemical smell. They pulled over, and a small reconnaissance team climbed out of their vehicles, then stalked down a trail. Behind a thicket of trees, tucked in a clearing, they found an open-air drug factory—not a huge surprise in Sinaloa, the capital of the global narcotics empire built by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Five cauldrons for cooking heroin stood exposed to the sky, flaked with rust. In the camp’s makeshift living quarters, bags of tortilla chips and a cooler of unopened Pepsis suggested the cooks had left in haste.
The soldiers discovered the source of the smell: acetic anhydride, a clear liquid that reeks like vinegar. Except for the sap drained from opium flowers, it’s the only thing truly required to make heroin, and it doesn’t take much of the stuff to do the job. Soldiers found some inside four 18-liter jugs that, when full, could have produced 80 pounds of high-quality “China white,” with a street value in the U.S. of at least $3.6 million.