It began with the death of a 20-year-old mom, just a month after her baby boy’s first birthday. She was one of 70,000 Americans lost to the scourge of fentanyl in 2021.
Police officers couldn’t save Diamond Lynch, who overdosed in her Washington, D.C., apartment after taking a pill laced with the powerful and dangerous chemical opiate. But they quickly began investigating how she died, with the help of federal prosecutors and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Starting with some text messages and a handful of pills, authorities unraveled a massive fentanyl distribution network that extended from the D.C. area to California to Mexico. So far, 25 people have been charged. Court documents say the dealers did business largely in the open, largely on Instagram, and smuggled fentanyl-laced pills in candy boxes. The pills were made to look like Percocet and other pharmaceutical opiates.
It’s part of a DEA initiative called "OD Justice,” an effort to work backward from overdose deaths to try to hold traffickers accountable and make a dent in the flow of fentanyl.
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“We are doing hundreds of investigations like this across the United States,” Anne Milgram, head of the DEA, told NBC News.
Investigators used messages on Diamond Lynch’s phone to find the dealers who sold her the fatal dose, Milgram said. “Then we expanded it out to who was supplying them. We traced that back to Los Angeles, San Diego and ultimately to Mexico.”
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