NITAZENES ⟩ Estonia's Battle with Deadly Synthetic Opioids Reveals Global Drug Trade Links to China

On December 7, 2023, police responded to a domestic violence call at an apartment in the Kopli district of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Upon arrival, they identified a man in his 30s, Sergei, and his partner, both of whom appeared to be extremely intoxicated. Sergei carried a mini-grip plastic bag containing 15 grams of a dirt-coloured substance, according to court files inspected by Postimees.

Testing would later reveal the substance to be protonitazene: one of many types of a synthetic opioid known as a nitazene.

Nitazenes are up to 40 times more powerful than fentanyl and up to 500 times more potent than heroin. Even trace quantities of these drugs can lead to respiratory failure and it can sometimes take up to six or seven shots of an opioid overdose-reversing drug to save lives, rather than a single shot.

Since 2019, nitazenes have been found all over the world, including in at least 20 European countries, the US, Canada, and Australia.

This article is the result of a collaboration with Bellingcat. You can find Bellingcat's corresponding piece here.

Estonia is at the frontier of this emerging drug crisis. In April 2019, it became the first country in Europe to identify isotonitazene. The latest figures, from September 2024, show that half of all drug-related deaths in the country over the past two years were caused by nitazenes. Since 2022, at least 127 people have died in the country with a population of just 1.3 million.

«We see that every year: it's not step-by-step, it's a huge increase,» said Katri Abel-Ollo, a researcher at Estonia«s National Institute for Health Development.

A months-long investigation by Postimees and Netherlands-based investigative group Bellingcat identified a trove of more than 1,000 online adverts selling six of the most common types of nitazenes and offering worldwide shipping and delivery. The investigation established that a series of entities linked to the adverts match listings for companies on China's corporate register – including one registered company that is currently advertising scores of nitazenes online.

That company, Guangzhou Wanjiang Biotechnology, says it offers a safe delivery service to Europe and boasts of «discreet» packaging and shipments that «100% pass customs». According to a corporate records search the company is being liquidated, however it is still listed as «active». At the time of publication Guangzhou Wanjiang had multiple listings on its website selling metonitazene, etonitazene, isotonitazene and protonitazene. Its Telegram account also posts images and videos of various drugs, including nitazenes.

Collage of different advertisements for nitazenes Photo: Andre Taal

Emails to addresses associated with Guangzhou Wanjiang bounced or were not returned. A woman who answered a number listed on a Guangzhou Wanjiang advertisement said she did not know what nitazenes were and was not part of the company. Repeated attempts to reach other numbers associated with the company or listed on its advertisements were unsuccessful.

Additionally, Postimees spoke to local authorities and drug users, and combed through nearly 80 nitazene-related court rulings to build a picture of how nitazenes have infiltrated Estonia. The findings point to further links to China, where the synthetic opioids are often produced, and show how lucrative these drugs are for dealers who can sell them on the street for up to 100 times the wholesale price.

Tracing the Supply Chain: European Nitazene Seizure Reveals Links to China

In March 2024, a few months after Sergei was first stopped by police, he ordered protonitazene again. To cover his tracks, he used a prepaid SIM card and ordered the drugs under his partner's name, via a US number on a WhatsApp account registered to a «Lilly».

Postimees found that this number is listed on the Chinese website of an entity called Nova New Material Technology, based in Nanjing city. Nova New Material Technology's website uses stock photos or images that appear on other Chinese websites, and advertises precursors for drugs like 4-MMC – a synthetic drug also being distributed in Estonia under the names «Shanghai» and «Meow-Meow».

Its archived website from March 2024 shows that it previously advertised three types of nitazenes – butonitazene, metonitazene and protonitazene.

These drugs have a «99 per cent purity» level, according to the ads, and can be couriered in 1kg and 5kg bags or 25kg drums. Archived versions of the site say the pharmaceutical company is focused on «serving foreign customers» and that its products have been sent to more than 30 countries.

Screenshot of Nova New Material Technology«s website from March 2024 showing that they sold three types of nitazenes Photo: Wayback Machine

Sergei's package arrived at a parcel machine in the outskirts of Tallinn from a DHL distributor address in Koln, Germany, according to the court file. After he picked it up, Sergei was arrested with almost 50 grams of protonitazene – enough to sell on the street for around €30,000, based on Postimees' analysis of court verdicts and interviews with the police.

Rait Pikaro, head of the Northern Prefecture Narcotics and Organized Crime Unit in Estonia, explained to Postimees that it's common for criminals to order drugs and their precursors from countries where controls are weaker and where large logistics centres are already established.

Another court file inspected by Postimees shows that two mini-grip bags of metonitazene – one of the more common forms of nitazene – was intercepted by authorities after arriving in Estonia from an address in Athens, Greece. The drugs were packaged inside a larger aluminum foil bag. One of the mini-grip bags contained 0.2 grams of the drug, with 85% purity – the most potent nitazene ever confiscated in Estonia, according to the court files Postimees examined.

Also inside the package was a voucher offering a discount on the illegal drugs: «It's November cold weather, rainy days and cloudy sky. Sh*t! But we are giving you a hot coupon code to warm up your days. Apply the coupon code during check-out: [code] to receive a 10% discount.»

«The Life is more beautiful with us,» the voucher signs off.

The other bag, which contained 0.2 grams of metonitazene, had a sticker indicating a ratio of 1:3. Technically, the one-part concentrate, three-parts ballast substance should have a purity of 25%, but the court files said it was only 19% – showing that the strength of these synthetic drugs sold on the black market can be unreliable.

Postimees was told of two online sellers who supply nitazenes at this strength. A search of their websites confirmed that both advertise metonitazene at a 1:3 ratio. The domain of one of the sites is registered to a Chinese citizen and a building in Shenzhen city.

Screenshot of one of the stores selling metonitazene Photo: Wayback Machine

Posing as a buyer, Postimees contacted both websites and asked where the nitazenes were shipped from. One replied, and while they would not disclose the origin of the drugs, emphasized that nitazenes were sent from a «low-risk EU country». They added that the substance was shipped in «a strong aluminum foil bag,» as with the Athens case.

«We have many satisfied customers in Estonia and the delivery of order[s] below 5g works smoothly,» they said.

This investigation has also uncovered a direct link between China and Sweden. One package of yellow powder labeled as «nail paste» was shipped from the Minhang District in Shanghai to Stockholm in August 2019, according to a scan of the package label obtained through a public request to Swedish customs. Testing later revealed the package contained more than 48 grams of isotonitazene.

Sweden has recorded 37 nitazene-overdose deaths and faced multiple outbreaks since 2019, prompting alarm among health officials. «We're very concerned, especially since we have had this situation in Sweden before, with the fentanyls from 2015 to 2018,» said Mimmi Eriksson Tinghög, an analyst with Sweden's public health agency.

Scan of a package label showing a nitazene shipment was sent from the Minhang District in Shanghai to Stockholm. Photo: Swedish customs

Sweden’s neighbouring country, Norway, has also identified multiple batches of nitazenes on its borders. Seizure reports obtained through public records requests to Norwegian customs show that the country seized at least 7 packages containing metonitazene and isotonitazene, totalling over 150 grams throughout 2023. The largest package, 90.4 grams, came from Hong Kong and arrived at Oslo’s main airport. Other packages arrived at Norway’s largest postal terminal and came from Germany and the Netherlands labelled as electronics, beauty products, and items like «plastic shell» and «pigment sample.»

Nitazenes hit Estonia: Europe's testing ground for synthetic opioids

Nitazenes were first produced in the 1950s by a Swiss chemical company as a new painkiller, but the drug was so potent that it was never approved as a medicine.

Decades later, these synthetic opioids have been found in over 20 European countries, including Slovenia, Poland, Norway, Ireland, the United Kingdom and most notably in the Baltic countries. «In terms of the development, it's a very fast development, and also seems to spread geographically,» said Martin Raithelhuber, illicit synthetic drugs expert with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Nitazenes have caused hundreds of deaths around the world. In the UK, authorities confirmed 179 deaths related to nitazenes between June 2023 and May 2024. In Ireland, nitazene outbreaks in 2023 caused 77 overdoses. In Latvia at least 38 people have died of an overdose in 2023. The US, Canada and Australia have also grappled with outbreaks over the past five years.

The drugs first arrived in Estonia in April 2019. Months later, a report from the Estonian ministry of the interior shows that isonitazene was being distributed by criminal organizations, instead of fentanyl.

There is a «very high danger of these substances and the potential to cause serious health problems,» deputy director general of Estonia's Agency of Medicines, Ott Laius, told Postimees. «Including the fact that they cause a lot of overdoses.»

At the time, isotonitazene wasn't banned so police could only confiscate the drugs on the grounds of public health issues if they identified someone in possession. On occasion, they would even return the drugs to the user, said Pikaro. It was only in January 2020, when isotonitazene was added to Estonia's list of controlled substances, that prosecutors had a legal basis to file charges.

New synthetic opioids continued to be synthesized faster than authorities could ban them until December 2023, when Estonia banned them as a group.

The fast-changing pace by which manufacturers innovate means that drugs can quickly be modified to evade existing drug laws. Those alterations may produce unexpected effects, experts say.

«They go through these variations, small tweaks of the molecules at certain places of the structure,» said Raithelhuber. «And the problem always is that you can't be sure what it does to the effect.»

Estonia has a long history with opioids. Estonia's fentanyl epidemic started in 2002, when the Afghan invasion interrupted heroin supplies, and was quickly replaced with the lab-made drug. A few months later, the media reported over 50 fentanyl deaths and Estonia was described as the «world's only long-standing, mature fentanyl market» in a 2019 report. During the worst years of its opioid epidemic, Estonia had the highest drug-related fatal overdoses per capita in the world.

A breakthrough occurred in 2017, however, when police cracked down on major fentanyl labs and arrested key individuals involved in its distribution, removing almost ten kilos of the drug from the streets. By the end of the summer, there were fewer sellers, fewer fentanyl-related overdoses, the substance became more diluted, and prices increased.

But a new drug emerged: 1,500 fentanyl-related deaths later, fentanyl has been pushed out of the market.

New geopolitical circumstances will likely only exacerbate the problem. China's crackdown on fentanyl in 2019 coincided with a rise of new nitazenes found in Europe. And in 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Europe's largest opium supplier, and imposed a poppy ban which led to a 95% decline in heroin production. Experts are concerned nitazenes will fill this vacuum.

«At some stage the heroin will dry out, we know for sure,» said Thomas Pietschmann, senior research officer at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. «And then there's the danger that some people may start using nitazenes and that's particularly dangerous because of its high potency.«

Hidden Networks and Unanswered Questions

Estonian authorities say that the distribution of synthetic opioids tends to happen overland, for example in private vehicles, under the guise of freight, rather than online. Most of the drugs, they say, come from their neighbouring country, Latvia.

«As far as we know, nitazenes are not currently being ordered by mail, but we must be prepared for this risk,» said Pikaro. The drugs are so potent they can be shipped in envelopes or packages in tiny quantities, making it difficult for police to catch.

Pikaro adds that nitazenes are sold in person and users tend to get the substance from trusted dealers. The drugs are often hidden in secret locations, such as forests, or stashed in odd places, like chocolate Kinder eggs, according to the court documents.

Across Europe, nitazenes are often sold as fake painkillers, such as OxyContin or Subutex. In 2023, almost 6,000 fake oxycodone tablets containing N-desethyl isotonitazene were seized in Portugal and 12,600 fake oxycodone tablets containing metonitazene were seized in Poland. Also in 2023, police and border officials in the UK seized 150,000 tablets of nitazenes, the country's largest ever seizure of synthetic opioids. Last year, more than 3,000 fake tablets containing metonitazene were found in a Polish taxi entering Sweden.

As a result, authorities in Europe are struggling to clamp down on the drugs.

«There are only propositions,» said Kalvis Klints, chief inspector at Latvia's drug enforcement unit. «We don't know directly where they are coming from. But we ask these questions in a lot of meetings in Europe, and no one really knows directly where they come from.»

Multiple experts told Postimees over the course of this investigation that Chinese entities are likely involved in manufacturing nitazenes, considering their fraught history with other synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Information reported to international organisations that monitor synthetic opioids also support this view, but evidence is still very limited.

«There's not much evidence on where these substances are coming from. But when this information is reported, it appears that many of them are sourced in China,» said Ana Gallegos, head of the early warning, alert, laboratory network with the European Union Drugs Agency.

Ordering nitazenes online: a lucrative business

A Postimees analysis of nearly 80 criminal court judgments related to nitazenes in Estonia shows why these drugs are spreading so quickly: money.

The December 7 court case where Sergei ordered two batches of protonitazene shows that he paid €300 for 15 grams. Police estimated the value at €3,250, but Postimees calculated that the street value could be as high as 100 times this amount if diluted to street grade purity and sold as individual doses.

According to multiple court rulings, dealers usually pack a single gram of nitazenes into 25-30 doses, each weighing around 0.03 – 0.04 grams. They can then sell them for €20 apiece. The substance is so strong that its consumed in milligrams, not grams.

The average purity of confiscated nitazenes in Estonia since 2020 is 8%, records show. For Sergei it would have been feasible to dilute his 15 grams of highly potent protonitazene into 57 grams of street grade nitazene – worth almost €30,000 when sold as individual doses.

«There are groups that are dealing with drugs in the capital Riga, and they are trying to sell drugs abroad in Estonia because there is a huge price difference,» said Klints.

Latvian police have been able to take down multiple criminal networks, said Klints, but the high markup for dealers selling in Estonia and beyond means new ones keep emerging.

«There's a lot of money in the game,» he said.

The Human Cost of Nitazenes: Addiction and Overdoses

Andres* first started taking heroin at the age of 13. A few years later, when heroin supplies dried up, he started using fentanyl, an even more potent drug. And then, when fentanyl supplies disappeared he opted for an even more powerful entrant to the underground drug market: nitazenes.

Experts say most users in Tallinn are from Kopli and Lasnamägi — districts built during the Soviet era to house immigrated Soviet workers. Both are mainly Russian-speaking areas, but Kopli has been gentrified over the past decade. The Estonian police and an analysis of nitazene-related court sentences show that the Russian speaking community in Estonia is the worst affected by nitazenes.

«It's a strong Russian community. And of course, we can go beyond that, that it's a problem of integration. But they mostly have lived here their whole life,» said Abel-Ollo.

According to Pikaro, the Russian community in Estonia is disproportionately affected because of the «partially preserved Soviet-era criminal subculture, where the use of opium poppy and heroin by injection was more widespread.»

When fentanyl hit Estonia»' black market, users took up the more powerful alternative. Pikaro thinks that a similar shift has occurred with nitazenes: «The vacuum created when fentanyl dried up was quickly filled by nitazenes,» he said.

An apartment building in Kopli that is a known hotspot for opioid abuse Photo: Eero Vabamägi/Postimees

Looking back at 2022, when nitazenes overdoses spiked, Pikaro says police underestimated the scourge of the drug. «The sign of danger was there, but we still thought that there had been a change in the habits of those who had previously used fentanyl – some had sought treatment, some had managed to abstain from using it themselves, many had started using other drugs.»

Andres previously confirmed to Postimees that stronger batches of metonitazene and protonitazene were sold in 2022, which caused a surge in overdoses: «If you used to do two фольга»s [fol'ga – a dose packed in aluminum foil] and you would feel more or less okay, then now you could use one фольга three times.»

«People started dying overnight,» says Andres, who estimates that about 25-30 acquaintances he met on the street have died of overdoses in the past two years.

Mait* is in his late 20s and became addicted to opiate painkillers after a sport-related injury. At first, he was prescribed codeine and later oxycodone. He started abusing the drugs until doctors refused to prescribe. Mait started buying oxycodone pills from the black market instead, where they were quite expensive.

Mait switched to nitazenes when he could no longer afford oxycodone pills or when his dealer wasn't answering his phone. They were cheaper, but also far more dangerous. «My life got to a point where I couldn't leave my house for more than two hours, because I needed to smoke some more,« he said. «In July I decided that's enough and quit nitazenes the cold turkey method.»

He stayed in bed for the whole month, feeling the worst he has ever felt and had no contact with the outside world. The withdrawal symptoms were so bad, he decided he would never go back to nitazenes

Igor*, now in his 30s, is another nitazene user. He used synthetic opioids intravenously on-and-off for over a decade and has been in and out of rehab. Igor says that in the worst cases people inject up to a quarter gram of nitazenes, costing over €100 a day. For him, being off nitazenes has been a crippling experience.

«It's like a clamp around my head and every time I inject, the clamp disappears for two hours,» he said to Postimees.

The batches also seem to be contaminated with other drugs. Court files show that bromazolam, a type of benzodiazepine similar to alprazolam used in Xanax, has been mixed with nitazenes.

Although Kopli has been going through gentrification during the last decade and more, there are still left few reminiscence of its past Photo: Eero Vabamägi

In January 2023, the veterinary drug xylazine was found in the bodies of two people who overdosed from nitazenes. Xylazine and bromazalom are not opiods, so naloxone – an opioid-reversing drug used in overdoses – does not work on these drugs.

In May 2024, after the surge of nitazene overdoses in the past few years, naloxone was added to Estonian police equipment. Pikaro explained that its inclusion is novel on a European scale. Apart from Estonian police, only Scottish police are equipped with naloxone. «There have been several cases in Estonia where police officers have been the first to reach a person in need and prevented a person's death because of administering naloxone,» he said.

Currently, naloxone is being sold as a prescription drug, but Estonian drug harm reduction specialist Mart Kalvet says both injectable naloxone as well as the nasal spray must be made available over the counter. «Especially now when some harm reduction centers have been forced to close down due to budget cuts,» he said. «All possible options for reversing overdoses should be as accessible as possible and their use should be normalized in society.»

Over the past five years, pharmacies have provided syringes and needles to drug users, and encourage them to bring these back in order to dispose of them properly. The state-led effort aims to prevent the spread of different infections. Ly Rootslane, head of an Estonian pharmacies association, said that pharmacists are not allowed to dispense naloxone, but that an exception has now been made for the police. «We hope that this exemption will be extended to pharmacists as part of the legislative changes that will expand pharmacy services. It is important to provide help to those in need as quickly as possible.»

* Names have been changed to protect privacy. Real names are known to editorial staff.

Photo: Journalismfund Europe

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.