As the use of this potent synthetic opioid grows in New Zealand, so does its devastating impact. Our discussion with Tim Beck from the US offers us an in-depth look at the widespread reach of fentanyl, the lessons we can learn from the US experience, and strategies to combat its alarming rise in our communities. Tim Beck is Executive Director of Nevada Narcotic Officers Association, retired Narcotics Detective, and Task Force Officer with Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The Drug Detection Agency (TDDA) recently held their 20th Anniversary Conference in Auckland, and Family First were granted access to interview some of the top international experts who were speaking at the conference. (Thanks TDDA!)
Show script auto-generated by Descript app:
Family Matters – The Growing Threat of Fentanyl In New Zealand
Bob McCoskrie: Well, Tim, welcome to the country for the benefit of our audience. Tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into this work.
Tim Beck: I was a corrections officer in Chicago back in 96. I then decided I didn’t wanna be a corrections officer anymore. Wanted to get on the road and do you know, street cop work. Tested for Las Vegas Metro back in 97 and got hired on and did five years in patrol of Vegas Metro. And then my last 20 years on the job I was narcotics. So, I’m considering an expert witness in narcotics and in cop confidential employment handling. I retired back in 2022. My last year I was doing the fentanyl overdose investigations.
I got really burnt out, seeing dead kids 13 year olds, 14 year olds, 16 year olds. I got kids that age at home and decided enough was enough. I had 25 years on, I retired. Now I go around the country technically around the world and speak to audiences about narcotics right, and narcotics investigations.
Bob McCoskrie: When I sat in on your session earlier, you showed a clip from TV nz, which is our state broadcaster. And it was about New Zealand being called out in the US State Department briefing about fentanyl coming into the country. Yeah. I think New Zealand’s been a little bit focused on the meth issue and sort of have thought, okay the Fentanyl’s a US issue. But your message to New Zealand seems to be No, that’s not the case.
Tim Beck: No. As a matter of fact, the numbers I’ve pulled up this weekend or this week, well since I’ve been here, shows that opioids are your number one overdose problem. So when you say opioids, what do you mean? Opioids can include ezines. Or magazines fentanyl, heroin stuff along those lines. Opioid based synthetics, or like I said, heroin, which is a plant-based.
Bob McCoskrie: Okay. Opioid. And I think New Zealanders would say, oh yeah, heroin we’d expect that, but fentanyl has that really got into the country. And why is New Zealand seen as a market for Fentanyl when we’ve got meth already?
Tim Beck: Well, just like any other drug in New Zealand. Your guys, the profit margin in New Zealand’s way higher than in America or other spots in the world. Why is the profit margin higher when you gotta get it here in the first place? It’s because of the distance it takes to get here and the travel. It’s gotta make to get here. Right. And obviously the limited availability in New Zealand as opposed to America where it’s flooded the streets. One of the instructors just now is talking about you guys. You know, most of your drugs are coming through the dark web. Yeah. You can get on the dark web today, order up fentanyl from a distributor in China, which is actually much closer than the US and they could send it, or you can order up from somebody down in Mexico and have it shipped. And I think some of the articles I showed in class today showed that you guys have had seizures. There was an article i shared where you guys had. 12 overdose overdose victims that were related to fentanyl.
Bob McCoskrie: Yeah. What’s the difference between fentanyl and meth?
Tim Beck: Fentanyl’s an opioid, it’s a depressant. It’s gonna just slow your respiratory system. Meth is a stimulant, right? It’s gonna increase your heart rate and what not. We’re where when opioids gonna slow it down.
Bob McCoskrie: And so is there a certain predisposition of a person who would use meth versus fentanyl or vice versa? Or do they just combine them and just get whatever kick they can?
Tim Beck: Well, nowadays they’re combining. I just discussed today when I was speaking that Chicago Undercover had purchased what he believed to be heroin, and it was meth. Heroin and fentanyl mixed together. So there’s no boundaries nowadays. You know, you previously in Vegas, if you ran across somebody who was a meth addict, they strictly did meth. Now you got people that are mixing these drugs together. It’s nothing different than a speedball back in the day, which was cocaine and heroin mixed together. Now you’re getting cocaine and fentanyl mixed together, meth and fentanyl mixed together. And it just gives you that up and down effect.
Bob McCoskrie: One of the arguments that especially left-wing politicians use in New Zealand is that, look, we should just test the drugs. Make sure it’s pure MDMA or whatever, because that’s safer than having all the additional stuff added to the drug. What’s your response to that kind of mentality? You know, make it safer. Test the drug.
Tim Beck: Oh, that’s crazy. I mean, that’s absolutely asinine. I mean, I, I. Like I talked in my class today, we’re just putting band-aids on the problem instead of educating people. You know, you’re gonna have children that are gonna be dying of this drug in the near future if you don’t get on top of it before it gets to your country and it’s already here. But before you start seeing what we see in Vegas and across the US where we’ve got 13, 14, 15-year-old kids dropping dead from fentanyl. So you gotta get on top of the problem before it happens and educate the citizens of New Zealand of how dangerous this drug is. That’s already here. The cartels are here, the drug’s here.
Bob McCoskrie: So have you heard of the concept of drug testing before? I mean, we have young people who might go to a festival or who go at the weekend, go down to a drug testing place, government funded, and they get the drug tested to make sure they are the pure illegal drug.
Tim Beck: I have not heard of that. No, we don’t have that in America. There are websites where they have, you can go on and I can show somebody, okay, I’ve got this pill of MDMA. Is it pure MDMA or is it mixed with something else? And then folks at home are doing the tests and they’re putting what their results are, but we don’t have that in America.
Bob McCoskrie: Is there a merit to that though? Can you see any merit to it?
Tim Beck: Well, I mean, I guess it’s making sure you’re taking what you believe you’re taking. So, I mean, is that good? I guess, but I mean, is narcotics use good? I mean, we shouldn’t be, again I, I. I think we’re coddling the culture of that, that, okay, it’s okay to take as long as we know it’s safe. Well, that doesn’t mean that MDMA can’t kill you in a pure form. You know, people overheat all the time at these rave clubs and we get overdoses all the time on with people taking pure MDMA. So we’re saying it’s okay to take an illegal drug as long as it’s that. What it’s being purported to be. And I think that’s just absurd.
Bob McCoskrie: I think New Zealanders are very familiar with heroin and ecstasy, meth. They’ve sort of been around for a long time. Sure. Fentanyls that you get on the block. So for our viewers, give us a Fentanyl 101 lesson. What is fentanyl? What’s it about? What effect does it have and why is it dangerous?
Tim Beck: So a fentanyl was created back in I believe it was 1959. By a chemist by the name of Paul Janssen. It’s been around for a long time. It’s been used as a medical opioid. My mother took she had fentanyl patches when she had her back surgery. It’s been used for years. The reason that we’re seeing it now on the market is because Purdue Pharma created a, an opioid epidemic in the US.
That was never seen before when they lied to the American citizens and the doctors in America saying that their drug was not addictive, when in fact it truly was, my mother was addicted to it. My mother-in-law died from like the tobacco industry. Yes. And Mexican cartels found a way to get into this market by bringing heroin once the FDA cracked down on the opioids.
They brought in their heroin and was giving out free samples. We had kids in schools in Vegas that were getting free samples of heroin. Now they’ve got their kids addicted to heroin. Now they’ve just figured out a way to make fentanyl and put it in a pill form and make it look like oxycodone and get into a market that they didn’t have part of before.
They couldn’t get into the oxycodone mark ’cause they didn’t have chemists making the pills for them. Right. But now they’ve made it from Fentanyl and it’s a much stronger and more addictive opioid than heroin. If you get your customers addicted to fentanyl, they’re gonna come back every single time.
And the heroin addicts don’t like it because they don’t understand that it’s what they’re purchasing is in fact a fentanyl. ‘Cause they’re making it look like heroin. Nowadays. We’re getting heroin Wow. On the streets of Vegas that is being purported to be heroin. And it’s really fentanyl mixed with corn syrup or vinegar to give it that heroin smell.
And you’ve got, oh heroin addicts taking it, not realizing that. I take this much heroin every day, but now I’m taking this much fentanyl and I don’t realize it’s fentanyl and we’ve got people dying from it. So it’s the Mexican cartels have really taken over the industry of fentanyl and marked my words within the next year or two.
You won’t see any heroin anymore. It’s all gonna be fentanyl, whether it looks like heroin, but it’s fentanyl, whether it’s pill form, powder form, it doesn’t matter. They’re just coming up with new synthetic opioids to replace other synthetic opioids once they get cracked down on the precursors, you guys are seeing Ezines here.
And you’ve got a lot of overdoses from the Ezines, which is just another opioid, a stronger opioid than Fentanyl.
Bob McCoskrie: So what’s your recommendation to New Zealand as to how they respond to this?
Tim Beck: Like I spoke in my class today. Education. Education. Speak to your kids. Go to schools educate these kids on the dangers.
We’re getting fentanyl mixed with marijuana in the US. We’re getting fentanyl mixed with cocaine. We’re getting fentanyl mixed with methamphetamine. As a kid growing up, in today’s day and age, you cannot experiment with drugs anymore ’cause you don’t know what you’re getting. You absolutely don’t know what you’re getting.
At the end of my presentation, that’s what I try to hit on the most, is educate and know what your kids are doing. Talk to your kids, know what they’re doing, make sure they’re safe. Get on their phones, see who they’re talking to, get on their Snapchat. See who they’re con conversing with on Snapchat – ’cause Snapchat’s an open marketplace for drug sales as is the dark web.
Bob McCoskrie: Can you just clarify for some people won’t know what you’re referring to when you say dark web, what do you mean by that?
Tim Beck: So, there’s apps like tour. It’s an open market for anything you wanna purchase.
It was created by the US government. I don’t know when it was created, but it was created by the US government for operations. And then it was eventually taken over, made use to the public. And when you get on the dark web, you have an anonymity. It’s running through different servers, so nobody knows who you are and you’re anonymous while you’re on the dark web.
And I can go on the dark web today. I could purchase a gun, I could purchase drugs, I could purchase. A person if I wanted to purchase, and there’s human trafficking going on, there’s child pornography going on in the dark web. And it’s available for anybody to use. These sites will come down.
The government will realize that, that there’s a site that’s that’s being used to sole illegal activity and illegal substances. They’ll take it down and a new site will just pop back up.
Bob McCoskrie: Why haven’t these sites been shut down?
Tim Beck: They do get taken down, but the problem is these. Folks that are running these these websites will just start up a new site, right? And they’ll just start up a new sales site. And as Keith Graves was talking about in his presentation, all you gotta do is go on Reddit and you can figure out where the new sales site is, and then you get on the dark web using tour. And then you can go to that website and purchase whatever you want.
Bob McCoskrie: I, I was I was both pleased and inspired by the fact that you have bought your two sons with you and you make them come and sit in on your seasons. Yes, absolutely. What are you trying to achieve through that?
Tim Beck: Well, I’m trying to educate them, you know, I wanna make ’em safe, you know, I wanna scare the out of ’em. Excuse, excuse my language. I wanna scare ’em. I wanna scare ’em so that they don’t go out and try these drugs, and I don’t have to be that parent that wakes up and finds my child dead. So that’s, it’s the education part of it.
Bob McCoskrie: But the argument is that actually the scaring and the saying no is not gonna work. It’s better to teach them how to do it safely.
Tim Beck: No, absolutely not. No. I absolutely wanna scare my kids. I wanna put the fear of death in them if they try something for the first time. You know, it’s not like when I grew up. And I can try and experiment with drugs. So you can’t do it nowadays without, no, not knowing what you’re actually putting in your body.
Bob McCoskrie: So it seems like you know, we’d like to keep the fentanyl outta the country, but that boat has sailed.
Tim Beck: Yeah. It’s already here. And the cartels are here.
Bob McCoskrie: Okay. So what’s your advice to politicians, legislators, in terms of how do they respond to this?
Tim Beck: Well, I was talking, I mean, I was just talking to some local law enforcement and they said the officers here don’t even have Narcan on ’em. You know? How are you gonna, if your partner goes down, just,
Bob McCoskrie: sorry, just explain what’s Narcan?
Tim Beck: Narcan is so it’s the drug that blocks the opioid receptor and it’s it’s, I have some up in my room. It’s just a small nasal spray you sprayed in your nose.
Bob McCoskrie: I think there’s been calls for ambulances to carry them. But you made a very good point during your session, is that when someone is totally off it, you can you, you need a buddy to save them. Yes. You’ll never sell that story, will you?
Tim Beck: No. So I, I was, you know, in America we’re putting a bandaid on the problem by providing free Narcan free test strips to these these addicts. And I’m finding them on our search warrants, on our scene, death scenes, they’ve got that stuff. But like I said, unless you’re working in a buddy system and you and I are here, are watching each other, I’m gonna take it first and you’re gonna watch me take it.
If we’re taking it together and we both go out, who’s going to Narcan us? Nobody. Yeah, because nobody else is gonna be there. And I think it’s, I think it’s absurd that the law enforcement and the medical EMT personnel don’t have this on hand because. It’s only a matter of time before one of your officers or one of your medics goes down giving CPR to somebody who’s got fentanyl on their lips or something, and now you’ve got an officer or a medic down and you don’t have anything to save their life, which the Narcan, like I said, I’ll block that opioid receptor, but with car fentanyl, you may take five or six of those narcans before they come out of it, and then you’re gonna have to keep giving them that Narcan while they’re going to the hospital.
Bob McCoskrie: Right.
Tim Beck: So, and then, you know, obviously I discussed you know, education is key in Las Vegas. We got billboards all over Vegas, you know, about one pill can kill stuff like that. So your government should be out there educating having the cops go to these schools and talk to kids about the dangers and drug use nowadays. Again, putting the fear into them that that one time could be your last chance, you know, and that one pill could kill you.
Bob McCoskrie: So is saying something radical like, don’t do drugs. Has that actually got a place now?
Tim Beck: Absolutely. 100%. I love the old videos where they crack the eggs in the frying pan. This is your brain on drugs. Yeah. Go back to that. Yeah. You know, put the fair fear of God in them that if they take that they might die.
Bob McCoskrie: So, for the states, has there been calls to, I mean, we’ve seen the calls for medicinal marijuana, then it was. Legalize recreation use of marijuana, magic mushrooms. Has there been calls to legalize fentanyl in this experiment that somehow that’ll drop use?
Tim Beck: So there’s not in, in certain states there is. I was just in really Pennsylvania and the guys in Pennsylvania told me that anything under seven grams of any illicit drug is a misdemeanor. There. So you got, you know, you, you have under seven, it’s decriminalization. They’ve pretty much decriminalized it, right? I don’t know what Colorado’s laws are. Thank God, in Vegas, we’re still you know, we’re, it’s still illegal, dude. I mean, we’ve kind of decriminalized marijuana, but that’s the only one. All the other drugs are still felonies if you get caught with ’em. But we haven’t quite got to the, every state’s different.
Bob McCoskrie: Yeah, we haven’t quite got to that. We’ve got to the police discretion. Not quite the full on decriminalization. Okay, good. But there are calls for decriminalization. That would be a dangerous step, would it?
Tim Beck: I, oh yeah. I think if you talk to the guys from Colorado, they would tell you what it’s done to their cities. And even the decriminalization of marijuana has increased the number of illegal clandestine gross sites throughout Vegas, like through the roof. Yeah. Because some of these legal grow shops are purchasing from those illegal growers without, you know, the government knowing and even in Vegas, they’re already up in arms because we have one of the worst school systems in the country. And that money, some of that money from the taxation on the marijuana is supposed to go to the schools. And people are like, where’s this money going? You know, so it’s not working. It doesn’t work in Vegas. The robberies have gone up. Violent crime has gone up because of those. Like I said, the the illicit marijuana grow houses have gone up.
Bob McCoskrie: If we were the most charitable we could be, we could say, okay, those who wanted to legalize marijuana or cannabis, as we call it in New Zealand, what they were trying to do was drive drug use down to the kind of the least harm drug, and it would drive people away from using fentanyl and the harder of drugs. Is there any truth to that?
Tim Beck: No, absolutely not. It’s the gateway, I would say, yeah, I mean, I think alcohol’s a gateway. You know, I, when I was a kid I did alcohol, I tried marijuana, I dabbled with other stuff. Drugs in general are gateway because they you know, kind of put down your guard and lower your inhibitions and you go out and try other stuff. Yeah. So, and marijuana’s no different. And we’ve legalized it in Vegas and it hasn’t changed any other drug market we haven’t seen. Opioid overdoses, decrease. Actually opioid overdose overdoses in Las Vegas are Nevada have actually gone up. Well, one of the five states where the overdoses have gone up. Yeah. So it’s definitely doesn’t work.
Bob McCoskrie: So you identified in New Zealand that the opioid deaths are the are high. Yes. But the usage is still quite low in New Zealand, but you are warning us that usage is going to increase over time, I guess. People like the addiction, they want more of it and they share the addiction.
Tim Beck: Absolutely. The fact that you have you know, heroin addicts, heroin’s gonna the wayside. It’s gonna be fentanyl in the future, or it’s gonna be some other opioid synthetic boom. Why’s heroin gone to this wayside? Because it takes five months to grow a poppy. Wow. And it takes 10 opiod 10 kilos of opium gum to make one kilo of heroin.
It’s a lot of time. An effort put into it when I can make a synthetic for way less. I think Heath was just talking about in his class, a kilo of heroin in Mexico goes for, you know, five 50, $500 and you can make it fentanyl kilogram of heroin for a like a thousand or a hundred bucks.
Yeah. It’s so much cheaper. It’s so much cheaper and so much easier Yeah, to make and wait quicker. I can make it in one or two days as opposed to five months. Three. So I think heroin will go to the wayside. We’re going to all synthetics in the future. And you won’t see much plant-based drugs anymore.
Bob McCoskrie: So what would be your advice to our, what we call the Minister for Police or even to the Police Commissioner? In terms of dealing with the issue of fentanyl addiction and coming into the country, the market,
Tim Beck: Like I said, I would for one, I would educate educate the officers, educate the public, provide them with the tools they need, the Narcan. Provide them with the training they need to understand, you know, to come to conferences like this and have us come and train them on what they need to be looking for. ’cause when I was working in patrol one of my last years, I was with my partner who was a 25 year patrol cop and we were out on the street ’cause I, once a year they’d make the undercovers dress up in a uniform and go out on the street and I’m out there with them and we do a car stop.
And I look in the car and I see. Aluminum foil sitting in the center console with what we call a snail trail and a pill at the end of it. And I tell my partner, I said, go ahead and yank him outta the car. We’ve got PC to get in this car, probable cause to get in this car. And we get ’em out. And my partner goes, what did you see?
And this is a 25 year veteran police officer. I said, didn’t you see the aluminum foil with the snail trail and the center console? ’cause I didn’t even know what that was. Man, you gotta educate your cops so they know what they’re looking for. You gotta educate your cops that these pills on the street are a hundred percent of the time gonna be counterfeit nowadays. Yeah. You know, they’re not gonna be legal prescriptions that they’re getting from their doctor and from a pharmacy.
Bob McCoskrie: Has it made workplaces more unsafe because of use of fentanyl and these other harder drugs?
Tim Beck: Absolutely. I mean, we’ve had in Vegas, we had a car dealership in Vegas where several employees all went down the same day. They all probably went on break and took a, what they thought was a Percocet, and it was a counterfeit fentanyl pill. Dude, you know, we’ve got scenes in Vegas. We had a school in Vegas where we had, I think seven kids on the soccer team all take a perk, 30. And they all went down. You know, none of ’em died, thank God. But you know, that’s, you’re gonna see this in your workplace. You’re gonna see the increase of it out there like we’re seeing in the us. Yeah.
Bob McCoskrie: So just finally for the families, for the parents that are watching this what’s your word of encouragement to them? What’s your advice?
Tim Beck: Educate. Know what your kids are doing. Be on their phones. Look at their phones, look at their Snapchats, look at their discords. If they’ve got dark web on their phone, why do they have dark web on their phone? Why do they have the tour app on their phone? Know what your kids are doing. Put a Life 360 app on your, on their, you know, on their device so that you know where they’re at all time.
Dude you know, if they’re under your roof, you should know what your kids are doing at all times. Ask questions, go search their drawers. Now I do that with my kids. My kids don’t know when I go into their rooms and search their stuff, you’re under my roof. You’re under 18. You know, I have that right to go do that.
Bob McCoskrie: Do you think there’s a level of ignorance as. But about fentanyl thinking, ah, no, it’s not in our country. No, absolutely. It’s not in our community and no, my kids dunno about it.
Tim Beck: Absolutely. I think I think New Zealand thinks it’s not here. And I’ll tell you right now, the cartels are here. The fentanyl’s here. I showed articles during my presentation that it’s here. I showed an article of folks overdosing here. It’s here to stay. You gotta educate and you gotta be proactive and go out and hit the streets and look for it.
Bob McCoskrie: Yeah. Tim, really appreciate your work in this area. It’s really important and thanks for the warning. Absolutely. And hopefully people heed what you’re saying, so thank you.