Fentanyl arrived late in Spokane but then exploded

As the fentanyl wave swept through the United States, federal prosecutors took notice and planned to crack down on the incident at the first sign of fentanyl in Eastern Washington.

“We knew fentanyl was on the rise, so we paid attention to it,” said Caitlin Baunsgard, assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington. “Because it's so deadly, you just see the devastation and the overdose deaths sweeping across the country. It's really quite depressing.”

The drug appeared in the Tri-Cities in 2016 or 2017, shortly after the arrest of a doctor who wrote opioid prescriptions led to a shortage of the drug for users, Baunsgard said.

The first federal fentanyl cases in Eastern Washington involved just 100 pills.

As fentanyl became more popular in the Tri-Cities, prosecutors like Baunsgard played a game of whack-a-mole, charging as many dealers as they could. From the defendants, they learned that the drug was largely used in the Tri-Cities.

“It never made its way to Spokane,” she said. “We kept waiting.”

Finally, fentanyl tablets appeared in Yakima.

“Then it spread like wildfire,” she said.

Since 2021, the number of fentanyl seizures in Washington has skyrocketed; according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Washington has the third-highest number of seizures in the country after California and Arizona, both southern border states.

Spokane is also seeing a drastic increase.

In 2021, Spokane police seized 10 fentanyl pills. So far in 2024, they have seized more than 76,000, along with large quantities of the drug in powder form.

According to the DEA and the Attorney General's Office, most of the fentanyl in the United States comes directly from drug cartels in Mexico and Central America.

“Our district is a transportation hub for drugs,” said Baunsgard.

Money moves

“Our work in drug trafficking has been an important part of the office for decades, and the current focus on fentanyl is primarily due to the changing availability of this drug in our community and across the United States,” said Vanessa Waldref, U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington.

The dramatic increase in fentanyl seizures over the past five years is partly due to increased drug smuggling in the country, says Baunsgard, but increased law enforcement and public awareness of the problem also play a role.

When fentanyl first came onto the market, law enforcement agencies were unable to test it.

Police might arrest someone with cocaine or meth and then a few small pills. Those pills were originally opioids but eventually turned into fentanyl, Baunsgard said. During investigations, officers often focused on the larger amount of the known drug.

“Five years ago, the fentanyl trade was still in its infancy,” says David F. Reames, special agent in charge of the DEA’s Seattle Field Division.

During Reames' 20 years with the DEA, cartels were at the center of the drug trade. Fentanyl grew relatively quickly compared to other drugs.

After the drug was pressed into pills mainly abroad and then brought to the USA from around 2018, the cartels expanded their activities.

Fentanyl begins with the creation of a precursor chemical supplied primarily from China, he said.

It is easier to produce than other drugs like meth.

“If you know what you're doing, the saying goes, 'You can do it in a bucket,'” Baunsgard said.

Not only is the drug easy to produce, it is also easy to make money from it.

According to Spokane Police Lt. Rob Boothe, supply has increased while the price per pill has decreased.

“Back then, if we seized fentanyl and there were five pills, each one was probably between $8 and $12 and that was a big hit, like, 'Oh my goodness, this is a big deal,'” Boothe said. “And lately we're buying 20,000 pills at a time for less than a dollar a piece.”

Although costs have fallen, it is still profitable for a cartel to turn tens of thousands of dollars in investment into hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, he said.

Two ways

There are two common paths to getting into federal court on a fentanyl charge.

The first story, says Baunsgard, is the same for all types of drugs.

A person grows up in a cycle of poverty, addiction and drug abuse and becomes desensitized.

“Some of it seems to be generational,” she said.

They start dealing drugs to fund their habit, but the amount of drugs keeps growing and growing. If the state court system fails to change their trajectory, they can end up in federal court, Baunsguard said.

“We have drug addicts who have been in the business selling drugs for so long. They have a long criminal history that usually involves some form of violence,” she said. “They find a source that can give them a large amount of drugs and then they get caught with that large amount of drugs.”

One example is Jordy Deboer, who was recently sentenced to 22 years in federal prison after being arrested with approximately 24 pounds of fentanyl.

According to his lawyer David Miller, 32-year-old Deboer had a “terrible” childhood.

His mother married numerous times, and each stepfather brought with him a new form of abuse, Miller wrote in court documents.

He started taking methamphetamine when he was 17, Deboer told the judge when the sentence was announced.

He went to prison at age 20 and was clean when he got out in 2015. He met a woman at church and helped her raise her young daughter while he did concrete work.

Then the couple suffered a relapse.

This time, the amount of drugs was larger than ever before. He was caught smuggling drugs for a drug trafficking organization in the Tri-Cities in April 2022. While awaiting trial on those charges, a federal judge allowed him to go to therapy.

While in rehab, Deboer began dealing drugs again. He told the judge he didn't realize how strong the effects of fentanyl and meth were on him.

He was arrested in March 2023 at a Spokane Valley motel with several kilos of fentanyl.

The other route is directly linked to the cartel, said Baunsguard.

“It’s about the money for them,” she said.

Using cell phones and apps, the cartels used a model called “hotline or dial a pound,” in which the drug buyer in the U.S. often calls someone in Mexico and negotiates for a large amount of the drug, she said.

Then a courier, usually young and non-English-speaking, brings the drugs into the United States.

“They are the ones who risk being caught with large quantities of drugs,” Baunsgard said.

This siloed approach makes it extremely difficult to reach the higher-ups in the cartel. The people in Washington who could provide information about how they got the fentanyl don't know much.

They would say they called someone named Junior or Alex who got them the drugs, but they never met that person, Baunsgard said.

“If you try to purchase more than a consumer-grade amount of a drug when you buy it from a drug distribution point, you are almost certainly talking to a cartel member,” said Reames of the DEA.

If the drug traffickers are arrested, they have little incentive to reveal information about the cartel back home, she said. To deport someone from Mexico, prosecutors need a sworn statement from a witness that they personally saw someone commit a crime.

“These affidavits in support of extradition go to the Mexican government unsealed and unredacted, and anyone can access them,” Baunsgard said, describing the risk to the witnesses.

Often the drug traffickers are not US citizens. If convicted, they are deported after their release from prison, where they could be threatened or harmed by the cartel.

Although it is difficult to reach prominent members of the cartel, it is still possible. Brian Zazueta, son of Adoldfo Zazueta, who runs a branch of the Sinaloa cartel, pleaded guilty in June to possession of meth with the intent to resell.

Brian Zazueta, known as Junior, was arrested in 2023 with the meth and about 22,000 fentanyl pills at a drug stash in Kennewick. According to investigators, he was a middle manager in the drug organization.

According to court documents, prosecutors will recommend a 15-year prison sentence for Zazueta when he is sentenced in September.

Spokane and Washington as a whole have become a center for drug smuggling to other states, where dealers can sell the pills at higher prices.

“The joke in the drug scene is that if you make it through the Idaho panhandle, you've made it,” Baunsgard said.

Why fentanyl is such a big problem in Washington is still unclear to Reames, but he and his team are investigating. In the meantime, he continues to work to dismantle drug organizations to give users some breathing room so they can hopefully access treatment.

“If you can take out an entire distribution network, all of those hundreds of people they know to get their daily (supply), they have five or six people they can reach to buy drugs,” he said. “If we arrest all of those people at once, it gives customers a kind of breathing room where they can't get drugs right away.”