ILLEGAL NARCOTICS: THE TECH BROS SELLING DRUGS BY DRONE / THE ECONOMIST

Illegal narcotics

The tech bros selling drugs by drone

How criminal innovators are mastering synthetic drugs, AI, the dark web and drones

Illustration: Benedetto Cristofani

“NEW CHOPPERS, boots on the ground, more co-ordination, and increased resources.” 

These were some of the steps Canada has taken to halt the flow of fentanyl across the border to America, said the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, on March 3rd. 

Just 13 grams of the stuff was seized by American border authorities in January, down 97% from the same month in 2024. 

Nevertheless, hours later President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China in order, he said, to force those countries to stop drugs “pouring into our country”.

Although the number of deaths caused by synthetic opioids in America has begun to fall, these drugs still claimed almost 75,000 lives in the United States in 2023. 

Mr Trump’s actions have highlighted a growing worldwide menace: new classes of illegal narcotics derived not from Afghan poppy fields or Colombian coca plants, but from barrels of chemicals.

The gangs making them are not only cooking up new sorts of drugs with the help of chemists who jet across continents. 

They are also innovating across the entire supply chain, using the dark web and social media for retailing, and drones for logistics. 

Still newer technologies like artificial intelligence or autonomous and armed drones will increase the threat posed by these narco-innovators as law-enforcement agencies struggle to keep up.

The growing convergence between tech and drugs was illustrated by a discovery in December by police in Moscow: a robot dog wandering near the Pechatniki metro station, sporting the logo of Kraken, a drugs market, and carrying packages containing a powder. 

They did not disclose whether the robot was actually delivering narcotics. 

But even if it was no more than a brazen publicity stunt, it signals the growing reach and impunity of the group and of rival outfits. 

They have pioneered a new form of drug trafficking that blends high tech with spycraft.

Buyers connect with dealers on markets such as Kraken on the darknet, which is the part of the internet inaccessible to normal browsers. 

Drugs are left in concealed locations, like spies’ dead-drops. 

The whereabouts of a stash, or klad, is then revealed to a buyer once payment is made. 

These Russian outfits now dominate the worldwide cryptocurrency drug market. 

They account for some $1.7bn of the almost $2.4bn-worth of drugs bought using Bitcoin or alternatives such as Tron, reckons TRM Labs, a blockchain-intelligence firm that works with law enforcement.

Crypto-enabled drug dealing is still dwarfed by the older sorts, which may reasonably be estimated to be worth at least $600bn a year. 

And many consumers in western Europe and America still seem to prefer the older ways. 

Those using either the darknet or social media accounted for less than 10% of customers in both Spain and America, according to a survey published in 2020. 

Hand-to-hand transactions in bars, clubs and the street were still overwhelmingly the norm.

In Russia the new distribution methods have not only displaced face-to-face dealing, they have also reshaped the market. 

Convenience and low cost are spurring demand for synthetic drugs that are easy to make and far cheaper than imported ones such as heroin or cocaine, and often far more dangerous (see chart 1). 

The model is spreading, notes the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, an NGO with headquarters in Geneva.

For criminals, synthetic narcotics have clear advantages over plant-based drugs. 

There is no need to get involved in farming, or with farmers. 

Nor do producers have to worry about transporting illegal raw materials to the sites where they are turned into narcotics. 

Partly for those reasons, synthetics generally have higher returns. 

“Fentanyl is much more profitable than heroin,” says Angela Me, who edits the World Drug Report produced by the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

It is therefore puzzling, as she notes, that no chemical substitute has yet been invented for cocaine.

Synthetics are not without drawbacks. 

They are illustrated by a spider’s-web diagram pinned to the wall of an office on the same floor as Dr Me’s. 

It belongs to Martin Raithelhuber, a synthetic-drugs expert at UNODC’s laboratory. 

Two large nodes near the diagram’s centre represent amphetamine and methamphetamine. 

Threads radiating from both have smaller nodes, some linking others on adjoining lines.

Each of the smaller nodes represents a chemical. 

Those closest to the largest nodes are precursors: chemicals that can be used to make either amphetamine or methamphetamine, or both. 

Those farther away are “pre-precursors”, which can be used to make either a precursor or another pre-precursor that is one step closer along the thread to one of the big nodes.

As the challenge of synthetic drugs has emerged, the International Narcotics Control Board, also in Vienna, has imposed controls on some precursors. 

These controls are meant to be enforced by the 190 countries party to the UN’s convention on drug trafficking. 

In response, organised criminals have resorted to making the precursors by using pre-precursors which, like the precursors, mostly come from Asia, particularly China. 

In some cases, the pre-precursors themselves have been restricted. 

But others have innocuous uses as well. 

Banning them all could inflict serious damage on the chemical industries of the countries in which they are manufactured.

Fentanyl, for example, can be produced in at least three ways. 

One is used for medical purposes. 

Another, the so-called Gupta method, is often used illicitly. 

Finally, the Siegfried method is used only to produce fentanyl for trafficking. 

The precursors of all three are subject to control. 

But one of the pre-precursors employed in the Gupta method is freely available, as are two used for the Siegfried method.

Yet using these brings new challenges. 

“Because the drug manufacturers are starting the process with more and more basic chemicals, they need more and more complex processes to reach the end product,” says Mr Raithelhuber. 

“That requires more and more skilled brains to set up the processes and control them.”

In Myanmar, the leading source of methamphetamine in Asia, most skilled chemists are thought to come from Taiwan. 

These real-life Walter Whites appear not to be sworn members of crime syndicates, but are briefly spirited in and out of production sites. 

“Not so long ago, meth used to be made by extracting the active ingredients from medical products,” says Mr Raithelhuber. 

“Now you have police finding custom-built reactors able to produce drugs by the tonne.”

Another way the manufacturers of precursors can dodge international embargoes is by adding a molecule that turns a controlled substance into an uncontrolled one for transport. 

After delivery, the narco-chemists remove it.

Artificial intelligence could make things even more difficult for investigators. 

In 2022 Nature Machine Intelligence published an article noting that techniques used to develop new pharmaceuticals could be used to design entirely original drugs that would not feature on any blacklists. 

It may already be happening: because of the secretive nature of the business, innovation often takes years to become apparent, though new synthetic drugs pop up every year (see chart 2).

So do new methods of transport and distribution. 

On February 6th Colombia’s navy intercepted a “narco-sub” in the Pacific carrying more than 2.2 tonnes of cocaine. 

Colombian cocaine barons first began working with Russian submarine makers in the 1980s, as Derek Maltz, a former director of special operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), recently told CBS News. 

Yet reports of narco-subs were initially treated with scepticism. 

It was not until 2006 that the coastguard saw three plastic pipes gliding through the waters off Costa Rica. 

The pipes were attached to a semi-submersible vessel made of wood and fibreglass carrying 2.7 tonnes of cocaine. 

By 2008 American authorities were spotting ten such vessels a month, and by 2019 Spanish authorities had seized a 20-metre vessel that had crossed the Atlantic. 

Having mastered the sea, they have taken to the air.

By land, sea and air

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, cannot move nearly as much as submarines. 

The payload of even the brawniest is around 220kg. 

Yet the DEA first noticed drones being used by drug traffickers just a year after the first consumer UAV went on the market. 

Drones have several uses for narcos. 

They can waft drugs or weapons to gang members in prison. 

And they come in particularly handy around international borders. 

Where there are formidable natural or man-made barriers, they can be used to transport modest quantities of narcotics: border officials in the Punjab region of India said that last year they intercepted 107 UAVs bringing drugs from Pakistan. 

Where there are viable routes for narcotics couriers, or “mules”, drones can be used to alert them to the location of frontier patrols, and the directions in which they are moving.

UAVs may yet acquire a fourth—and lethal—use. 

Last month America’s Customs and Border Protection service reportedly warned its agents that Mexican gangs might attack them with UAVs carrying explosives. 

Yet two can play the game of drones. 

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, recently said her government is allowing flights by American surveillance drones looking for fentanyl labs. 

Tech innovation cuts both ways.