US charges two Surat companies for smuggling chemicals used to make opioids

NEW YORK, New York (Reuters) – Two Indian chemical companies have been charged with allegedly importing ingredients for the highly addictive opioid fentanyl into the United States and Mexico, the US Department of Justice said on January 6.

Athos Chemicals and Raxuter Chemicals, both based in Gujarat, were charged in Brooklyn with distributing the ingredients and conspiring to distribute them.

Raxuter and top executive Bhavesh Lathiya, 36, were also charged with smuggling and introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce.

Lathiya was arrested on January 4 in New York and ordered detained pending trial after prosecutors called him a flight risk and a substantial danger to the community.

“The Department of Justice is targeting every link in the fentanyl trafficking supply chains that span countries and continents and that too often end in tragedy in the United States,” said US Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid approximately 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.

Opioids accounted for about 82,000 deaths in the United States in 2022, ten times more than in 1999, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prosecutors said that since February 2024, the defendants supplied “precursor” chemicals that they knew would be used to manufacture fentanyl and concealed their efforts by mislabeling packages, falsifying customs forms and making false statements at border crossings.

An indictment said that in October 2024, through video calls with an undercover agent posing as a fentanyl manufacturer, Lathiya agreed to sell 20 kilograms of the chemical precursor 1-boc-4-piperidone and suggested mislabeling them as an antacid.

Lathiya did this after the agent told her that his clients in Mexico were “very happy with the quality of what he sent me” and the “yield” of the resulting fentanyl, according to the indictment.

The other indictment said Athos agreed last February to sell 100 kilograms of the same chemical to a known drug trafficker in Mexico who was manufacturing fentanyl in connection with a drug trafficking organization.

Lathiya faces up to 53 years in prison if convicted.