An in-depth report conducted by the New York Times follows how the Sinaloa Cartel is recruiting young college students studying chemistry to make Fentanyl. The Times report included interviews with seven fentanyl cooks, three chemistry students, two high-ranking operatives and a high-level recruiter. All of them work for the Sinaloa Cartel, which the U.S. government says is largely responsible for the fentanyl pouring over the southern border.

The cartels “know we are now focused on the illicit trafficking of these precursor chemicals around the world,” said Todd Robinson, the State Department’s assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

But as the cartels gain greater control of the fentanyl supply chain, U.S. officials say, it will become more difficult for law enforcement in both countries to stop the industrialized production of synthetic opioids in Mexico.

The Times details the information it learned from one of the recruiters:

Before the Sinaloa Cartel ever approaches a recruit, it scouts out its prospect.

The ideal candidate is someone who has both classroom knowledge and street smarts, a go-getter who won’t blanch at the idea of producing a lethal drug and, above all, someone discreet, said one recruiter in an interview.

In months of searching, he said, he’s found three students who now work for him developing precursors. Many young people just don’t meet his standards.

“Some are lazy, some aren’t bright, some talk too much,” said the recruiter, a lanky middle-aged man with square glasses, who has worked for the cartel for 10 years. He described himself as a fix-it man, focused on improving quality and output in the fentanyl business.

To identify potential candidates, the cartel does a round of outreach with friends, acquaintances and colleagues, the recruiter said, then talks to the targets’ families, their friends, even people they play soccer with — all to learn whether they’d be open to doing this kind of work. If the recruiter finds someone particularly promising, he might offer to cover the student’s tuition cost.

“We are a company; what a company does is invest in their best people,” he said.

When the cartel began mass-producing fentanyl about a decade ago, the recruiter said, it relied on uneducated cooks from the countryside who could easily get their hands on what people in the business call “recipes” for making the drug.

The Times also writes about one of the students recruited to be a fentanyl cook by the cartel:

The cartel offered the student $1,000 as a signing bonus, the woman said. She was terrified, but she said yes. The lab where she works is about an hour’s flight from Sinaloa’s capital, on the small aircraft the cartel uses to transport cooks to work. Her bosses told her that her job was to manufacture more powerful fentanyl, she said.

The fentanyl coming out of Mexico has often been of low purity, a problem the recruiter attributes to the desperate rush to satisfy Americans’ appetite for the synthetic opioid.

“There was such an explosion of demand that many people just wanted to earn money, and those manufacturers just made whatever without caring about quality,” the recruiter said. But in a competitive market, he said, the cartel can win over more clients with a stronger drug.

The first-year student said she had experimented with all manner of concoctions to increase fentanyl’s potency, including mixing it with animal anesthetics. But none of her attempts at producing fentanyl precursors have worked.

A second student, who is a sophomore chemistry student, detailed how he had been recruited on campus, but had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. He said the lab was in the mountains, in the midst of trees and covered by a tarp that had been painted to look like foliage, so it couldn’t be seen from a helicopter.

After three days of work, he said, one of the men in charge told him that he wasn’t there to make fentanyl. He was the newest member of a research and development lab, where everyone was working to figure out how to make precursors from scratch. He said he immediately started worrying about inadvertently causing an explosion.

“They don’t tell you how to do it — they say, ‘These are the products, you’re going to make them with this, it could go wrong, but that’s why you’re studying,’” he said.