a team of Reuters reporters spent months finding out just how easy it is to get hold of everything needed to begin making and selling these synthetic opioids we potentially had enough chemicals to make somewhere in the range of $3 million worth of street drugs what we discovered helps to explain why us authorities are struggling to get on top of the illicit trade in some areas of the country like Philadelphia you see fento being uh present in nearly all opioid samples that we test it’s the synthetic opioid that’s killing tens of thousands of Americans a year fentanyl is the street drug behind the majority of the Fatal overdoses recorded in the US last year