‘I have nothing, but I have drugs’: The forgotten victims of the war on fentanyl

The bullet took mercy on him. They forced him to his knees, the gun against his head. The shots —“bang, bang, bang” — pierced the quiet of the early morning at Laguna Salada, deep in the vast, desolate desert that surrounds Mexicali. “I didn’t feel anything, just heat. When the bullet hit me, everything went blurry, and I fainted.”

The shot grazed his forehead, leaving a scar that’s still visible more than 20 years later — a wrinkled mark at the base of his scalp — but it didn’t lodge in his skull. He had mixed with people it was better to avoid.

“We let them down. And that’s death. If you owe someone a kilo of heroin and you don’t pay, they’ll kill you, and if they can’t find you, they’ll kill your family. And I didn’t want that.” When he regained consciousness, he found two bodies lying beside him. “I was talking to them, but they were dead.”

Blood trickled down his forehead, covering his eyes. He wiped it away as best he could, dragged himself through the sand, made his way to the highway, and hitchhiked to Mexicali. At the hospital, he overheard the doctor calling for a patrol car, so he fled. He went to a friend’s house, cleaned up, borrowed some money, and, trembling with fear, caught a bus to Ciudad Juárez that same day. The bullet showed more compassion than his dealers. Perhaps it was the only time Ismael Olvera was lucky.

That night at the turn of the century wasn’t the last time Olvera stared death in the face. He has turned 50 as a living defiance to medicine. He’s a survivor of the Mexican border, one of many in a population invisible to statistics, overlooked by the official numbers used on both sides of the Rio Grande in that illusion that Richard Nixon called the war on drugs and, years later, Donald Trump inherited, transforming it into a crusade against fentanyl, the opioid 50 times more potent than heroin. As Olvera recalls his encounters with death on a March afternoon, the fentanyl, leaves the syringe stuck in his right wrist, and makes its way through his bloodstream.

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Latin America's first supervised drug consumption room (Spanish)

Olvera blinks, taps the veins in his arm with his fingers, and sighs in relief. He wants to keep talking, but his eyes close, he forgets what he was saying, and he sinks into a synthetic delirium — right there in Verter, the first facility on the continent where addicts can use drugs in a safe, professionally supervised environment.

By now, everyone knows that the United States, the most drug-addicted country in the world, is hooked on fentanyl. The opioid has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in recent years. We know because the deaths are meticulously recorded in official statistics. But of addicts like Olvera, born just a few meters away on the wrong side of the border, almost nothing is known.

He is one of the forgotten casualties of Trump’s war on fentanyl, the weapon he wields daily to threaten Mexico and Canada with tariffs unless they crack down. During his presidency (2018–2024), Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador denied that fentanyl was produced — or even consumed — in Mexico, even though reality insisted otherwise. His successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, under pressure from Trump, has acknowledged its production but insists there is no consumption, which is limited to border cities. Not even naloxone, the life-saving opioid antidote, is legal in Mexico. Harm reduction organizations on the border smuggle it in from the U.S.

According to Sheinbaum, fentanyl hasn’t taken hold in Mexico because families are very close-knit. Amid these hollow narratives, the country lacks real data or public programs beyond prevention campaigns that, as Lourdes Angulo, director of Verter, puts it, are “criminalizing” addicts: “Overdose deaths have risen in recent years. There’s the rhetoric, and then there’s what’s happening. Saying ‘fentanyl kills’ is a half-truth. What really kills is not having access to naloxone, not having harm reduction services.” For López Obrador, for Sheinbaum, for Trump — Olvera simply doesn’t exist.

Olvera followed the same path as dozens of other users who were interviewed for this story— the one marked out for those who have never known anything but abuse and neglect. He started with marijuana at 12 or 13, smoking with neighborhood friends. In his family, drugs were commonplace, as were beatings and theft. Still a teenager, he made the switch to methamphetamine. From there, heroin was a natural, almost logical next step. By 15, it was part of his daily routine — first smoked, then injected for a faster, more intense high. On those streets, the brown powder is easier to find than a job or a school diploma.

“The first time it makes you vomit, it’s not pleasant, but the second time you start to like it. You feel like peace inside, you see everything calmly, a pleasant tingling, the rush.”

The rush, the euphoria, doesn’t last long. With habitual use, you need more and more. You spice it up with other substances. “I threw coke in it, a speedball.” He left home, joining the 500 others who sleep in the streets, parks, and ruins of Mexicali. “You’d see me lying on any corner, in any abandoned house. I had to steal. I was already doing almost a gram a day.” A downward spiral of “jails, hospitals, beatings, hunger.”

Years blurred into decades, until that life brought him to his knees before a gun to his head and a merciful bullet. He fled to Ciudad Juárez, scraped out a living in informal camps, washed cars, collected garbage, and never gave up heroin. “And when they thought I was dead, I made a call four years later. My mother answered, and she didn’t believe it was me.”

He returned home, got clean, got married, had children. For a while, it worked. Then, things took a turn for the worse. He relapsed. By then, the brown powder was beginning to be cut with a new opioid — cheaper, stronger, deadlier. That’s how he discovered fentanyl.

Born hooked

Verter is located in Mexicali’s Chinatown, a neighborhood that for decades served as a backyard for American parties but has since become rundown. The border wall stands less than 200 meters away. Through the bars, you can see Calexico — the other side of the coin — neater, cleaner, with streets laid out in precise right angles and bevels, the quintessential American suburb. Mexican children cross daily to attend school there, workers commute back and forth, and Americans make the reverse journey to buy cheap, over-the-counter medications at Mexican pharmacies.

Among them there are also addicts with U.S. passports who come to Verter because nothing like it exists on their side of the wall — no one to exchange clean syringes, test their doses for free, or verify that their fentanyl is actually fentanyl and not adulterated with substances like xylazine, a pet sedative.

Take, for example, a couple who comes almost every week, books a hotel for a few days, gets high, and then returns to Calexico. One day, the man arrives at Verter with neatly combed hair, a leather jacket, and a medical mask. He drops off a handful of used syringes, picks up fresh ones, politely declines an interview, and disappears into the streets of Chinatown.

The people who come to Verter often share similar backgrounds: a first encounter with opioids in adolescence that they never managed to escape, childhoods in neglected neighborhoods, and stories of loneliness and isolation. Verter serves a population of about 400 addicts. The majority, 80%, are men. However, more women die.

Paulina Montserrat Leal was born in Guadalajara three decades ago. She came to Mexicali 15 years ago to visit a brother who had moved to Calexico. She liked the city and decided to stay, working in bars and restaurants downtown. She had a heroin-addicted boyfriend and wanted to see if the peace she saw in his eyes after shooting up could also quiet her own mind. Since then, she hasn’t been able to stay clean for more than two weeks.

Not even when she was pregnant with her second child, who was born with fentanyl already in his blood. “He was born hooked, but he was born alive.” Both of her children live in Guadalajara with her family. For years, she has only seen them through video calls. “But they know who their mother is and everything.”

She just injected herself, fending off la malilla — the withdrawal symptoms — before they could take hold of her body. She lives in a tenement with a good man, she says, someone who has “adopted” her and treats her with respect. He asks her to stop using. She hopes to get clean someday.

Heriberto Salazar shares a passport with Trump. He was born 52 years ago in California. He was a teenager when heroin first took hold of him. He fled to Mexico to escape a prison sentence on the other side. Now, he unloads trucks just to scrape together a few pesos. “I don’t know how to live clean anymore. It’s been so many years. And I swear I’d like to quit, but I can’t. It’s a constant struggle.”

Mario Martínez, 55, took the opposite path. He grew up in Mexicali, crossed into California, and got hooked at 17 — “because of a failed love.” After a couple of deportations, he stayed in Mexico. “Right now, I’m not planning to quit, but I’d like to. I have an 11-year-old grandson.”

José Ángel García was attacked by dogs two years ago. They broke his arm, leaving a scar on his body. He could only manage in hospital if was under the effects of tranquilizers. The pain was so unbearable that he had to return to the streets to get a fix. The wound never healed — his dislocated bone now juts out at an unnatural angle.

Sometimes, he gets tired of the fact that his life is just the space between syringes. He dropped out of school at 16 when he first encountered crystal meth. Heroin followed soon after. Now, at 25, he reflects: “I don’t like being pessimistic, dude. I have nothing — no TV, no radio, no cell phone. Just a suitcase with two changes of clothes, and that’s it. But I’m alive. I don’t have a girlfriend, I have nothing. But I have drugs.”

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