The trafficked podcast with Marianna Van Zeller is intended for mature audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

There's a boat that I think might be the people we're meeting.

So a few months ago, I was in Mazatlan, Mexico, in Sinaloa, actually.

It's a nice little beach town full of tourists. There are cruise ships

out in the ocean, there are beaches packed with beachgoers. You look at it and it just looks like a

totally normal fishing boat. So my journey actually started about a mile offshore where there was a

boat full of men fishing barrels out of the water.

There were about 10 barrels, white barrels that were thrown out to sea.

I'd never seen anything like it. I mean, these barrels had crossed the Pacific Ocean from China on a container ship. And just before the container ship reached the port of Mexico in Mazatlan,

they'd been pushed off the side and into the black market.

So it has to be really quick, guys. They're saying that they don't feel obviously safe here.

The barrels were filled with the precursor chemicals needed to make fentanyl, which is a synthetic

opioid about a hundred times more potent than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin.

So I was at the very beginning of the Sinaloa cartel's billion-dollar fentanyl pipeline,

a pipeline that moves this deadly drug north into the U.S. and into the bloodstreams of American users.

Okay, they say they have to go because there's the Marines all around us and they're worried.

I'm Mariana Van Zeller, the host of the National Geographic TV series Trafficked.

Each week on the series, I dive into a different black market and meets the people who make their living inside it.

But this is a little different. From National Geographic and Muck Media, this is the Trafficked

podcast. Each week I'll bring you the story of one person who made it big in the black market,

how they lived the high life, and how it all came crashing down.

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