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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Know who those players are.”:: Reporters visited 10 vacation spots and border towns across Mexico this year and bought controlled prescription medications from pharmacies. Tests showed many pills were tainted with powerful drugs including fentanyl, heroin, meth and MDMA. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) After visiting 10 vacation spots and border towns across Mexico this year, reporters used drug-testing strips and later lab testingto show that travelers who shop at pharmacies there risk unwittingly buying pills tainted with powerful drugs, including fentanyl, heroin, meth and MDMA — also known as ecstasy.In February, The Times reported that some drugstores in Tijuana and the Los Cabos area were selling loose pills over the counter, passing off tablets containing fentanyl and meth as expensive brand-name medications, including Percocet and Adderall.A team of UCLA researchers, including Goodman-Meza, reported similar findings in four unnamed cities in northwestern Mexico around the same time.But U.S. authorities didn’t take public steps to address the issue until March, after The Times reported that both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department had known for years that U.S. travelers were dying after purchasing counterfeit pills containing fentanyl from Mexican pharmacies.The State Department issued a travel advisory later that month, warning Americans to “exercise caution” when buying medications from pharmacies south of the border. In the Yucatán Peninsula city of Playa del Carmen, pharmacies in the tourist zone welcome foreigners. (Connor Sheets / Los Angeles Times) After several more trips to Mexico, The Times published an investigation in June that documented the presence of counterfeit medications at drugstores in cities from the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico to the Pacific coast to the country’s northern border.Later, reporters showed that several stores and at least a few regional chains had begun selling tainted medications by the bottle, in elaborate packaging that was sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing.Of the 114 narcotic medications purchased over the course of the year, 62% were fake. Just over 71% of the stimulant medications used to treat attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder — such as Adderall and Vyvanse — were counterfeit, as were nearly 61% of the supposed opioid painkillers.A few medications were consistently legitimate, including the opioid painkiller tramadol and the ADHD pill methylphenidate, best known as Ritalin. But some medications were almost always counterfeit.Testing showed that 9 in 10 pills sold as Adderall, six in 10 pills sold as oxycodone, and 7 in 10 pills sold as hydrocodone were fake. Overall, 26 samples contained methamphetamine and 29 contained fentanyl.:: Many pills purchased by reporters in Mexico this year were lab-tested to confirm the initial findings from testing strips. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) In March, authorities in Mexico inspected more than 100 pharmacies in
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