Mainstream reporting acknowledges that people are dying from fentanyl, but vague on details about where drugs come from.

Many of the Hays County kids who overdosed thought they were taking Xanax or Percocet; instead, the pills turned out to be counterfeits laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl is easier and cheaper to manufacture than natural opioids. It’s also much stronger, and can be unevenly distributed in counterfeit pills, making dosing more difficult. “My daughter told me that her and him were both taking Percs in Indiana,” Kerry Jeffrey, whose sixteen-year-old son has overdosed on fentanyl twice since he moved to Texas two years ago, told me. “But they were real Percocets. That’s what these kids think they’re taking, and it’s not. So is it worse down here? Yeah.”