Seven months ago, Cindy Jacquet came home after running errands with her daughter and found her son’s car parked in their driveway.
After noticing his brake lights were still on, she walked over to greet her 22-year-old son.
“I just went up there to say, hey,” Cindy said. ‘He goes to the gym in the morning. I thought he went to the gym. He was dead when I got to the car.’
According to the Department of Justice, on April 19, 2024, Cindy’s son Bryce Jacquet allegedly purchased pills from 21-year-old Benjamin Anthony Collins, a Los Angeles County resident with a criminal history of drug trafficking.
Bryce ingested some of the pills in the front seat of his car shortly after allegedly purchasing them from Collins. However, the drugs were laced with protonitazene, an illegal drug about three times stronger than fentanyl. Federal prosecutors said he died quickly outside his family’s home in Santa Clarita, just a few miles north of Los Angeles.
In the seven months since his death, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has gathered evidence to prosecute the nation’s first criminal case involving the new synthetic opioid.
The Ministry of Justice believes that Bryce Jacquet’s case is the first recorded criminal case resulting in death protonitazene in the country.
“The federal government happened to see this case and worked so hard for our son – and for other children out there,” Cindy said. “We are very grateful.”
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, fentanyl has become a household name after the synthetic opiate, typically used for surgery or to treat severe pain, was responsible for about 68% of overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the Center of Forensic Science Research and Education, protonitazene entered the illicit drug market in North America around the same time as fentanyl before May 2021.
“We have a lot of nurses in our family who have never heard of it,” said father Andrew Jacquet. “I have a niece that this is what she does for a living, [treating] addicts. She says it’s the first time she’s even heard of it [drug].”
With a potency 50 times stronger than heroin, fentanyl eventually entered the illicit drug market, commonly squeezed into counterfeit pills, according to the CDC. Protonitazine is roughly three times more potent than fentanyl and 150 times more potent than heroin.
“Fentanyl, that’s the synthetic opioid we all know now,” said retired Special Agent Bill Bodner, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles office. “We are all affected by deaths caused by fentanyl. Protonitazine is three times more powerful than fentanyl.”
Developed in the 1950s, protonitazene and the 20 or so similar drugs in the ‘nitazenes’ family work in the same way as morphine and other opioids. However, they were never approved for distribution in the US market.
“Why have these drugs never been approved by the FDA?” Bodner asked. “Because one of the reasons is that they are just too strong. There is really no need for such a strong drug. There is no legitimate medical use for these drugs. These drugs are scheduled as Schedule 1 drugs, which means they ‘In the United States the rules are very limited.”
The federal government uses the practice of scheduling to categorize medications based on abuse rate. Protonitazene lands at the top of the scale with other Schedule 1 drugs that have a high potential for abuse and can cause severe psychological and physical dependence.
“We started seeing it in 2021,” said Bodner, who retired from the DEA in 2023. “In 2022, the government planned it. “They did contingency planning. In short, to make everyone aware that this is an extremely dangerous drug. It’s illegal.”
In a study published in August 2024, the DEA stated that nitaszenes are not approved for medical use anywhere in the world. In August 2023, scientists identified twenty deaths in the US and UK attributed to protonitazene.
‘It’s here. It is on our streets,” Bodner said. “There are several medications that you will unfortunately hear about over the next six months and the next two years that will contain ‘nitazene’ at the end.”
The Jacquets hope that Bodner’s prediction does not come true.
“It can’t just start with these small-time drug dealers who sold my son a drug,” said Andrew Jacquet. ‘They need to find out where this stuff comes from. They have to treat it like it’s terrorism because it’s ruining families in America.”
