Colo. ‘body farm’ might help tackle fentanyl abuse in Mexico
WHITEWATER, Colo. — The two women lifted a stiff corpse from the ground, revealing a squirming bug in the dirt.
“That one is a live larva!” said Alex Smith, the lab manager of Colorado Mesa University’s Forensic Investigation Research Station, plucking the larva off the ground and stuffing it into a glass tube. Maggots aren’t just maggots, Smith explained — they’re potential evidence.
“You can actually test the larvae and pupa casings for drugs,” he said, excitedly.
His audience was a group of Mexican medical examiners who last month traveled to the Colorado facility, known as a “body farm,” where dozens of bodies donated to science are laid out in the sun to be studied as they decompose.
The Mexican forensic specialists came to learn about testing cadavers for fentanyl, which is how they wound up in a field of corpses, observing as a researcher foraged in the dirt for maggots.
Their trip had been organized by the U.S. State Department, where officials hoped it would help achieve a key diplomatic goal: getting Mexico’s government to contend with its own fentanyl problem. In northern Mexico, aid groups and rehabilitation centers have sounded the alarm about a rise in fentanyl use in recent years, reporting a wave of opioid overdoses along parts of the border with the United States. The Mexican government says the drug’s spread is contained, and overall consumption remains relatively low.
In reality, no one knows exactly how common fentanyl use is in Mexico. There is little recent data on drug abuse at a national level, and most Mexican forensic pathologists are not systematically testing dead bodies for fentanyl, medical examiners and U.S. officials say.
“In Mexico, you don’t see cases of fentanyl overdose, not because people aren’t dying of fentanyl, but because we aren’t testing them,” said Dr. César González Vaca, the chief medical examiner of Baja California state, adding: “We don’t look for it.”
Mexico is the dominant source of the illicit fentanyl trafficked into the United States, according to the U.S. government, and while the Mexican armed forces reported a substantial increase in drug seizures last year, synthetic opioids continue to flood across the border.
Fentanyl has been found in counterfeit pills sold at pharmacies in northern Mexico as well as in party drugs like cocaine and MDMA at a music festival near Mexico City.
One strategy for getting Mexico to do more to curb the flow, U.S. officials say, is to demonstrate fentanyl isn’t just an American addiction — it’s killing Mexicans, too.
The trip to Colorado “was an effort to help Mexico recognize that it has a problem, no matter how inconvenient it may be,” said Alex Thurn, an official at the bureau of international narcotics and law enforcement affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.
So, on a brisk February morning, more than a dozen forensic examiners and chemists from northern Mexican states piled into the Denver Office of the Medical Examiner to watch the autopsy of a middle-aged man found dead on his garage floor.
The night of his death, he told his on-again, off-again girlfriend he had taken “10 blues,” likely referring to fentanyl pills, the pathologists said.
Ian Puffenberger, a forensic pathologist, squeezed the man’s lungs, and a stream of foam came spilling out. That, Puffenberger said, was “a common finding” in opioid deaths, as a person’s breathing slows and their lungs fill with fluid.
Sawing into his skull revealed another sign of overdose: the bumps on his brain, known as gyri, looked less bumpy than they should.
“If there’s swelling of the brain,” another effect of opioid overdose, Puffenberger said, “those gyri push up against the skull and flatten out.”
Beyond their top-of-the-line knives and gleaming facilities — the subject of some chatter among the Mexican coroners — the American pathologists also had an array of expensive tools available to confirm the man had died of an overdose.
They did preliminary blood tests in a machine that costs more than $30,000, which turned up positive results for fentanyl, methamphetamine and amphetamines. Then they sent samples off for a full toxicology screening at a drug-testing laboratory in Pennsylvania.
“We felt like we were in Disneyland,” Vaca said. “They have everything.”