Photography
It’s one fentanyl overdose every seven minutes. Teams of paramedics responding to frantic emergency calls, trying to revive victims, often arriving too late.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
The deceased are sometimes sprawled out in the dark, as if they were shot, but the accessories to death are needles or pills or powder, strewn next to the bodies. The fentanyl they consume — in some cases unsuspectingly — is trafficked into the United States in hatchbacks and sedans, stashed in trailer parks and homes that are occasionally the sites of dramatic busts. But law enforcement officials now recognize their limits: They seize only a fraction of the fentanyl that enters the United States.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Emergency responders revive a woman who overdosed outside her apartment on Nov. 11 in San Diego. The city is ground zero for fentanyl trafficking into the United States.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Police Lt. Ken Impellizeri, left, and his officers at a fatal overdose at Mission Beach in San Diego on Nov. 12. More than half of all the fentanyl seized along the southern border is confiscated in the city.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Impellizeri with Homeland Security Investigations agent Ed Byrne at a fatal overdose in San Diego on Nov. 10. Byrne has responded to nearly 500 such deaths since 2018.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Members of a U.S. drug task force make an arrest during a methamphetamine seizure on July 20. The bust took place after a suspicious vehicle was flagged at the border near San Diego.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Task force members allow the arrestee to say goodbye to his son.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Byrne watches as members of the San Diego Medical Examiner's Office remove the body of an overdose victim from a downtown apartment building on June 5.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Cars in Tijuana line up to cross the border into the United States. Much of the fentanyl coming from Mexico is hidden in passenger vehicles and commercial trucks that pass through official ports of entry.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
It is not only an American crisis. Fentanyl is now manufactured in Mexico — and it flows through the country on its way to the border. Much of it remains in cities like Tijuana, where communities of deportees have become addicts. Paramedics there are stretched even thinner than their American counterparts, trying to save overdose victims in a country where naloxone, which reverses the effect of opioids, is almost impossible to find.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Volunteer medics and firefighters in Tijuana on Oct. 20 help a man who was inured in a hit-and-run.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
A man who was beaten and tied to a pole is treated by volunteer medics in Tijuana on Oct. 20.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
José González has someone inject fentanyl into his neck. The 32-year-old, who came to Tijuana after getting deported from the United States, has run out of veins where he can stick the needle himself.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
In Tijuana, the trafficking of synthetic drugs like fentanyl has prompted a surge of violence — and it’s the users who are frequently victims. They sleep outside, next to heaps of garbage, sometimes swallowed up by feuds with the men who sell them fentanyl. Traffickers and dealers have taken over much of the city, converting even piñata factories into fronts for their drug businesses.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
A fentanyl lab disguised as a piñata shop that was raided earlier this year.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Mexican authorities seize thousands of pounds of drugs there a month. Much of it is stored as evidence in a converted garage — even though many fentanyl cases never come to trial. Vast quantities are incinerated at a military outpost outside Tijuana. But most of the fentanyl makes it to the border and then across it, a bulk destined for the thousands of Americans who will die almost immediately after consuming the drug.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Two men in Tijuana are overtaken by the effect of fentanyl right after injecting it.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
A gap in the border wall near a neighborhood in Tijuana.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
A load of fentanyl and methamphetamine seized near Ensenada, Mexico, on Oct. 18. No one was arrested in the seizure.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Emmanuel Ibarra, left, and Daniel Espinoza Alcántara of the Mexican attorney general's office stand in front of thousands of pounds of drugs that have been set on fire at a military outpost outside Tijuana.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post
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