Craigslist has become a hotspot for Southern Californians to score dangerous drugs, such as fentanyl, with dealers selling it under inconspicuous code names to slide under the radar.
The classified advertising platform has listings all over the Los Angeles area for Boba Fett action figures, blue socks, and “fine China” — terms to which drug experts say, “If you know, you know.”
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) drug use researcher Chelsea Shover told the Los Angeles Times that if someone perusing Craigslist is not in the “know,” these code names “might not create a suspicion.”
“People have been able to buy drugs on Craigslist for a long time,” Shover said. “But these ads seem qualitatively different in how brazen a lot of them are.”
Until the publication’s reporters contacted Craigslist in May, the platform still suggested drug terms to people typing things in the search bar like “M30s,” which refer to oxycodone pills, and “fine china white,” a designer form of fentanyl.
While Craigslist did not respond to the Times about why its search suggestion auto-populated drug terms, the outlet reported Friday that “many of those slang words for fentanyl have now stopped showing up.”
Names like the Star Wars character Boba Fett and the rapper Fetty Wap or the foods fettuccine and confetti-flavored frosting have also been used to sell fentanyl on the site.
Those names may seem to obviously refer to the drug, due to the similar spelling, but ads for china plates, Chinese food, or things “made in China” are a lesser-known callback to “China White,” which originally was a street name for a very pure form of heroin imported from China, Drugrehab.com explains.
A new form of fentanyl — alpha-methylfentanyl — was discovered in California in the 1980s, according to a 1981 study published in Analytical Chemistry.
“Some dealers are believed to have mixed alpha-methylfentanyl with China White heroin during that time period,” addiction journalist Chris Elkins wrote for Drugrehab.com.
The current “china” on the streets of California and many other states can refer to heroin or synthetic fentanyl.
The convenience that online shopping for drugs allows users and dealers is making the illegal sale of illegal substances much easier, law enforcement officials have said.
Addicts do not need to know a dealer or take the risk of trying to score some drugs on the street — they just need to know a slang term and know how to type it into Craigslist.
“All those barriers that kept a lot of people away from drugs, those have been removed,” said Bill Bodner, former special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles field division. “You can live in Brentwood and get heroin delivered to your house in 20 minutes.”
The Times report stated that users caught selling prohibited items on the site can have their listings taken down and face fines of a whopping $4 per post, but “it’s unclear how that penalty is collected or how frequently people are actually asked to pay.”
The publication even interviewed Craigslist drug dealers under the condition of anonymity, who confirmed that what they were selling were drugs, not cupcakes or building materials.
One San Fernando Valley dealer who spoke with the newspaper offered “funFETti cupcakes w/ fun fet frosting” on the platform, advertising “several delicious batches of cupcakes ready to go, of course the most popular flavor funfetti is always on hand!”
Another dealer said a term used for black tar heroin is “roofing tar.”
“They’re trying to say they have fetty without being too blunt,” the dealer said.
Ads for Christina Aguilera tickets are sometimes selling crystal meth, Shover said.
The singer’s name has been a code word for meth for decades, with a 2005 New York Post article noting it being used on Craigslist.
“One giveaway is the number of ads,” the UCLA researcher said. “If someone is actually selling their blue china plates, they probably haven’t put up 30 ads. Another tell is concert tickets for a concert that isn’t happening.”
The quick-and-easy purchase of drugs on Craigslist has led to fast-tracked overdose deaths in California, the Times reported.
Tobin Oliver Wood of Costa Mesa was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison in 2022 for selling fake oxycodone pills known as “roxys” with a listing advertising “Roxy board shorts,” leading to the 2018 fentanyl overdose of a 32-year-old San Clemente man.
Andrew Madi of Hollywood was also sentenced in 2022 to more than ten years in prison after selling fentanyl that led to a fatal overdose under an ad for “roofing tar.”
The fact that Americans, especially Californians, are buying drugs with street terms blatantly referencing Chinese-imported drugs is a testament to the importance of Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer’s book, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.
The New York Times bestselling author revealed in his newest book that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has had links to Chinese organized crime through his connections to known triad members and that President Joe Biden refuses to hold China accountable for its role in the fentanyl crisis because of his family’s “financial entanglements.”
Peter Schweizer, author of Blood Money (BNN)
“Specifically, there’s a Chinese gang called UBG that’s widely credited with setting up the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico and making them the kings of fentanyl,” Schweizer said in a March Fox News interview.
“The leader of that gang is a guy named Chang An-lo who goes by the name White Wolf. It was White Wolf’s business with [a] partner who wired a $5 million if interest-free, forgivable loan to the Biden family,” the investigative journalist told anchor Maria Bartiromo. “And it was specifically designated not just for Hunter, for the family. So does Joe Biden want to have a conversation about these tough issues? Does he want to hold China to account? Absolutely not, and I’m convinced it’s because of these financial entanglements.”