BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Hello, I'm Matthew Price.

This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4, the podcast that asks one big question about one big story every day.

Today, who are the new drug barons?

If you've seen Narcos, if you've seen Narcos, if you listen to our El Chappo episode, you'll have a picture in your mind of the people who've controlled global drugs production for decades.

But there is a whole new world of narcotics that we're only just now finding out about. We hear about the

sharp end of course when someone dies after overdosing on fentanyl or one of the other new powerful

synthetic compounds that are being invented.

Today we wanted to find out about who's making these drugs, who are the new players in the industry.

And it turns out there are loads of them. They're popping up like digital startups,

mostly in China, and posting their product around the globe like a narcotics

version of Amazon. It's kind of like breaking bad but in China. The equipment is

high-tech, I'm told, but the facilities and the state of these labs, they're mostly

extremely dirty, not professional, they might be on a farm

or they might be in a kitchen. It seems that they can set up these labs anywhere, but the

worrying thing is they can produce what I've been told is a lot of these drugs

from relatively small property.

That's Danny Vincent, he's a BBC journalist, he lives in Hong Kong, and he's spent the last year finding and

meeting the people involved in this new trade.

Hello, this is our factory and that is one of them.

It's a production equipment in our factory.

It's one of the main equipment in our factory.

...