Deadly opioid 40 times more powerful than fentanyl smuggled into Canada inside PlayStations, basketballs
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The video call is grainy, but it's crystal clear what the person on the phone is trying to sell: illicit drugs, packaged and ready to be shipped to Canada.
The seller, who goes by the name Kim, says he sells cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and nitazenes, a powerful class of synthetic opioids most people have never heard of — but which can be up to 43 times more powerful than fentanyl.
"It can kill people, right? So, I just want to make sure that you know that," the CBC journalist asks in a secretly recorded phone call.
"That is the game," the seller replies.
The seller is one of the 14 people the CBC's visual investigation unit spoke to in text messages and phone calls after finding them through ads posted by users on major social media platforms such as LinkedIn, X and Reddit and e-commerce websites advertising nitazenes for sale.
WATCH | How synthetic opioids get into Canada:
Worse than fentanyl: How smugglers get a new, deadly drug into Canada
2 minutes ago
Duration 5:37
A CBC News visual investigation tracks how deadly and super-potent synthetic opioids called nitazenes make their way into Canada, where they have killed hundreds of people. With open source support from investigators at Bellingcat, CBC finds hundreds of ads for nitazenes online, posted to social media and e-commerce sites, and talks to the sellers behind them to expose how these deadly drugs get smuggled to Canada.
These ads, posted in the open, contain contact information that put CBC in touch with drug dealers who claim to be part of international criminal networks. CBC did not purchase any illegal substances.
Nitazenes, which have never been approved for medical use and are Schedule 1 drugs under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, have increasingly been turning up in drug busts across Canada.
Last year, two lab busts in Quebec alone may have accounted for more than a million counterfeit pharmaceutical oxycodone pills, which were actually protonitazepyne, a type of nitazene — or "analog" — according to the RCMP.
Nitazenes have killed hundreds of Canadians over the past four years, according to data collected by CBC's visual investigations unit from coroners across the country.
"[North Americans] not only are the largest consumers of nitazines, but really have the biggest problem as it relates to the number of deaths," said Alex Krotulski, director of the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education in Pennsylvania, a toxicology lab that tests for nitazenes in Canada and the U.S.
"This is really becoming an established drug class of novel synthetic opioids."
A more potent high
Nitazenes aren't nearly as popular as fentanyl and its analogs, but they offer a more potent high, making them appealing to drug dealers. Drug users might not even know they're consuming nitazenes, which can be laced into counterfeit pills.
"It makes me angry," said Montreal resident Christian Boivin after CBC shared its findings with him. Boivin's 15-year-old son Mathis died of a nitazene overdose last year after consuming what he thought were oxycodone pills. "[These sellers] don't have a conscience. They're bad people and they just want money… they don't care about lives."
Mathis's story isn't an isolated case. Because public-facing statistics group them as "non-fentanyl opioids," CBC reached out to coroners in all 13 provinces and territories to compile data on the total number of deaths from nitazenes in Canada.
The data received was incomplete — for example, Manitoba only provided statistics for 2024 — but indicates there have been nearly 400 deaths directly attributed to nitazenes or suspected to involve nitazenes since 2021. The true number of deaths is likely even higher.
"I guarantee you because of the variability in toxicology testing, the variability in practices and variability in funding availability… [the number of deaths] is underreported," said Donna Papsun, a forensic toxicologist at Pennsylvania-based NMS Labs, which tests samples from across Canada. "If they're not looking for it, you can't find it."
Going by the available data, the most deaths were in Alberta, with 121 since 2021, followed by Quebec with 91 and B.C. with 81.
"We're worried that this will continue to rise as an ongoing threat," said Dan Anson, director general of intelligence and investigations for the Canada Border Services Agency.
Sellers reveal how they smuggle drugs
One of the ways that nitazenes make their way into Canada is through sellers who advertise on social media networks by posting images of powders overlaid with contact information.
"Online ads are how this market functions right now," Anson told CBC.
CBC's visual investigations unit, with support from open-source investigators at Bellingcat, found hundreds of ads in user-generated posts for more than a dozen types of nitazenes on social media platforms, including X, Reddit, LinkedIn, Behance (a graphic design website owned by Adobe), and e-commerce websites in India such as Exporters India, Dial4trade and TradeIndia. They surfaced by the dozens in Google image searches for keywords related to nitazene analogs.
It often took mere minutes to receive a reply after responding to an online ad. Sellers were quick to share videos of their labs and products, even offering a step-by-step guide on how they would ship the drugs to Canada: first, by mislabelling the packages, then by concealing them inside PlayStation 5s, deflated basketballs, teapots and Chinese herbal packages. They would then be shipped via courier or the mail.
Previous reporting on the topic in the U.K. even had the drugs hidden in dog food and catering supplies.
One seller told a CBC reporter that shipments of nitazene could even be delivered the same day from Detroit, Mich., to Windsor, Ont.
Platforms respond to CBC's questions on nitazene ads:
"You'll see some pretty bizarre levels of creativity when it comes to importing illegal drugs," said Anson. "They're coming from online marketplaces ... and they're going to come through postal courier."
When reached by CBC for comment, LinkedIn, Reddit and Adobe removed the posts containing ads that were flagged. X did not respond to a request for comment and the flagged posts were still live at the time of publishing.
A Google spokesperson said it complies with valid legal removal requests from the public and authorities.
Dial4Trade and Exporters India, two India-based e-commerce platforms where ads were found, told CBC they added restrictions to block nitazene ads. TradeIndia, another platform, said it removed the flagged ads.
A global network
It became clear that sellers of nitazenes are spread across the globe, and aren't always who or where they purport to be online.
On the e-commerce site TradeIndia, next to the heading "Etonitazene Powder," was a picture of a brown powder offered by a Chinese biotech company. On its website, the company states "nothing is above the human health."
It has an address listed in Shanghai that doesn't exist on Google Maps. But the company was quick to explain why the address didn't exist when asked in a secretly recorded phone call.
"It's very dangerous to sell in China," a man who went by Jerry told a CBC reporter during a call with a Mandarin translator. Jerry said he and his partners needed a fake address to make the company seem real, but also so they couldn't be discovered by Chinese authorities.
Videos inside overseas drug labs
To show they were legitimate distributors, they shared videos from their lab — and said the name of the CBC reporter and the date to prove the video's authenticity — and showed us past shipments to Canada. They even offered to send samples of nitazenes for free to test for purity.
But the sellers weren't just from China. CBC spoke to sellers who claimed to ship from the U.S., the U.K., India, even the Philippines.
Over video, one seller who said they're from the U.K. showed shipment records that he said were for drugs going to Grande Prairie, Alta.
Like any global trade, some nitazene sellers said they were struggling with the impact of U.S. tariffs.
A person representing a company called Umesh Enterprises that claimed to be based out of India said nitazenes are "coming from India.... due to the issues going on between the U.S. and China with the tariffs," they said during a call. "There's been a lot of blockage from China so…. we go with India."
The speaker, like many of the sellers, acknowledged that importing nitazenes to Canada is illegal and knew how lethal these synthetic opioids can be.
"[These sellers] don't care how many people they take down or how many families they hurt," said Toronto resident Dale Sutherland, whose 22-year-old son Corey died from an overdose involving a nitazene in 2022.
"It's very frustrating…. we have to have more regulations, more strict penalties."
In response to CBC's findings, Canada's fentanyl czar, Kevin Brosseau, said in a statement the "emergence of nitazenes, and other highly potent synthetic opioids, is something I am concerned about and am taking very seriously."
Brosseau pointed to the federal government's recently tabled Bill C-2, or Strong Borders Act, which will give Canada Post more authority to open mail and remove barriers to law enforcement inspecting mail during an investigation.
Critics of the proposed act demanded the complete withdrawal of Bill C-2, warning it would expand government surveillance.
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