Fentanyl arrived in Spokane late, but then exploded

When the wave of fentanyl began moving across the United States, federal prosecutors took note and planned to crack down at the first sign of fentanyl in Eastern Washington.

“We knew fentanyl was coming so we were kind of on the look out for it,” said Caitlin Baunsgard, assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington. “Because it’s so deadly, you just watch the devastation and the overdose deaths like roll across the country. It’s really quite depressing.”

The drug popped up in the Tri-Cities in 2016 or 2017 shortly after the arrest of a doctor writing opioid prescriptions left a shortage of drugs for users, Baunsgard said.

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

As fentanyl began expanding in the Tri-Cities prosecutors like Baunsgard played a game of whack-a-mole indicting traffickers as they could. They heard from the accused that the drug largely was being consumed in the Tri-Cities.

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

Eventually, fentanyl pills popped up in Yakima.

“Then it spread like wildfire,” she said.

Since 2021, the amount of fentanyl seizures in Washington have spiked, recording the third most seizures in the country behind California and Arizona, both southern border states, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Spokane too has seen a drastic increase.

In 2021, Spokane police seized 10 fentanyl pills. So far in 2024, they’ve seized more than 76,000, along with vast amounts of the drug in powder form.

Most fentanyl in the United States comes directly from drug cartels in Mexico and Central America, according to the DEA and federal prosecutors.

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

Money moves

“Our drug trafficking work has been a huge part of the office for decades, and the current focus on fentanyl is really due to the changing availability of that drug in our community and in the United States,” said Vanessa Waldref, U.S. attorney for Eastern Washington.

The drastic increase in fentanyl seizures over the last five years is in part due to more drugs pouring into the country, Baunsgard said, but an increase in law enforcement and public recognition of the problem also plays a role.

When fentanyl first came onto the market, law enforcement couldn’t test for it.

Police might arrest someone with cocaine or meth and then a few small pills. Those pills used to be opioids but at some point they became fentanyl, Baunsgard said. Often officers focused on the larger quantity of the known drug when it came to investigations.

“Five years ago, it was in its infancy, really, fentanyl trafficking,” said David F. Reames, special agent in charge of the DEA’s Seattle Field Division.

Over the course of Reames’ 20 years in the DEA, cartels have been at the center of drug trafficking. Fentanyl grew relatively quickly, compared to other drugs.

After the drug began getting primarily pressed into pills abroad before being brought into the U.S. in about 2018, the cartels expanded their operations.

Fentanyl starts as precursor chemicals shipped mainly from China, he said.

It’s easier to make than other drugs like meth.

“If you know what you’re doing the kind of adage is, ‘You can make it in a bucket,’ ” Baunsgard said.

Not only is the drug easy to make, it’s easy to make money off of.

Spokane Police Lt. Rob Boothe said the amount of supply has gone up while the cost per pill has gone down.

“During that time, if we were to make an arrest of fentanyl, and it was five pills, and they would probably be between like $8 to $12 a pill and it was considered a significant bust, like, ‘Holy cow we got this is a big deal,’ ” said Boothe. “And recently we’re buying 20,000 pills at a time for less than a dollar a piece.”

While the cost has dropped, it’s still profitable for a cartel with tens of thousands of dollars in investment turning into hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, he said.

Two paths

There are two common pathways that will land someone in federal court for a fentanyl charge.

The first, Baunsgard said, is a story that’s common across drug type.

A person grows up around drugs in the cycle of poverty, addiction, or abuse and is desensitized.

“Some of it seems generational,” she said.

They start dealing drugs to feed their habit but the amount of the drug grows and grows. If the state court system has failed to change their trajectory they can land in federal court, Baunsguard said.

“We’ve got people who are drug addicts, who have been in the game so long selling, they have large criminal histories, usually involve some form of violence,” she said. “They find a plug or source who can provide them a big quantity of drugs and then they get caught with said big quantity of drugs.”

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

Deboer, 32, had a “horrific” childhood, according to his attorney, David Miller.

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

He began using methamphetamine when he was 17, Deboer told the judge at his sentencing.

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

Then the couple relapsed.

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

While released to attend treatment, Deboer began trafficking drugs again. He told the judge he didn’t realize how strong fentanyl and meth’s pull was on him.

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

The other pathway is tied directly to the cartel, Baunsguard said.

“They’re in it for money,” she said.

With the help of cellphones and apps, cartels use a model called “hotline or dial a pound,” where the buyer of the drugs in the U.S. calls and negotiates with someone in Mexico often for a large amount of drug, she said.

Then a runner, who is usually young and doesn’t speak English, will bring the drugs in to the U.S.

“They’re the ones who take the risk of getting caught with large quantities of drugs,” Baunsgard said.

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

They’ll say they called someone named Junior or Alex who gets them the drugs but they’ve never met them, Baunsgard said.

“If you reach out to buy anything beyond like a user quantity a drug, if you’re buying it, like a distribution point of drugs, you’re almost certainly talking to a cartel person,” said Reames of the DEA.

When the runners are arrested they have little incentive to provide information about the cartel back home, she said. To deport someone from Mexico, prosecutors need an affidavit from a witness that they saw someone commit a crime first hand.

“Those affidavits in support of extradition, they go to the government in Mexico, unsealed, unredacted, and anybody can have access,” Baunsgard said, describing the risk to witnesses.

Often the runners aren’t U.S. citizens so if convicted, once they are released form prison they will be deported where the cartel could threaten or harm them.

While it is difficult to reach prominent people in the cartel it does happen. Brian Zazueta, son of Adoldfo Zazueta who runs an arm of the Sinaloa Cartel, pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute meth in June.

Brian Zazueta, known as Junior, was arrested with the meth and approximately 22,000 fentanyl pills at a stash house in Kennewick in 2023. Investigators say he was a midlevel manager of the drug organization.

Prosecutors will recommend a sentence of 15 years in prison at Zazueta’s sentencing in September, according to court documents.

Spokane and Washington as a whole has become a hub for drug trafficking to other states where dealers can sell the pills for higher prices.

“The joke in the drug community is if you can make it through the panhandle of Idaho then you’re home free,” Baunsgard said.

It’s still unclear to Reames the totality of why fentanyl is such a huge problem in Washington but it’s something he and his team are studying. In the mean time, he continues to work to break up drug organizations to give users some breathing room to hopefully seek treatment.

“If you’re able to take out an entire distribution network, everyone, those hundreds of people who they know to get their daily (supply), they’ve got five or six people they can reach out to buy drugs,” he said. “If we arrest all those people at one time it’s going to give the customers, like, some breathing space where they can’t find drugs immediately.”