Two Indian chemical companies have been indicted for allegedly importing ingredients for fentanyl, a highly addictive opioid, into the United States and Mexico, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday.
Athos Chemicals and Raxuter Chemicals, both based in Gujarat, were each charged in Brooklyn with distributing the ingredients and conspiring to distribute them.
Raxuter and executive Bhavesh Lathiya, 36, were also charged with smuggling and introducing mislabeled drugs into interstate commerce.
Lathiya was arrested Saturday in New York and taken into custody pending trial after prosecutors called him a flight risk and a significant danger to the community.
“The Department of Justice is targeting every link in the fentanyl trafficking supply chains that span multiple countries and continents and too often end in tragedy in the United States,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a press release.
A federal public defender representing Lathiya declined to comment. Athos and Raxuter did not immediately respond to similar inquiries outside of office hours.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid approximately 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.
Opioids are responsible for about 82,000 deaths in the United States in 2022, 10 times the number in 1999, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Prosecutors said that since February 2024, the defendants supplied “precursor” chemicals that they knew would be used to make fentanyl, and concealed their efforts by mislabeling packages, falsifying customs forms and making false declarations at border crossings.
An indictment says that during October 2024 video calls with an undercover agent posing as a fentanyl manufacturer, Lathiya agreed to sell 20 kilograms of the precursor chemical 1-boc-4-piperidone and suggested mislabeling them as an antacid.
Lathiya did this after the agent told him that his Mexican customers were “very satisfied with the quality of what you sent me” and the “yield” of the fentanyl obtained, the indictment says.
The other indictment says Athos agreed last February to sell 100 kilograms of the same chemical to a known drug trafficker in Mexico who manufactured fentanyl in connection with a drug trafficking organization.
Lathiya faces up to 53 years in prison if convicted, the Justice Department said.