The Tartan

Finding a job after graduation can be an intimidating process for students, and if you’re an undergraduate chemistry student in Mexico, the job pool is now delving into the illegal. According to a New York Times article, cartels in Mexico are luring undergraduate chemistry students in Mexico to work for them. Their goal: to synthesize precursors.

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network Advisory Board of the United States, precursors are chemicals used to synthesize drugs. Cartels in Mexico primarily obtain their precursors from companies located in the People’s Republic of China, which they then synthesize into fentanyl and distribute in the United States With China restricting exports of fentanyl precursors to Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic clogging supply chains, Mexican cartels are seeking to synthesize precursors by recruiting chemists.

The Tartan spoke to Dr. Bruce Armitage, Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate chemistry department head and professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon, to learn what faculty in the chemistry department at Carnegie Mellon think of the issue.

“It’s shocking, but not at all surprising,” Armitage said. “When I got my PhD, I was at the University of Arizona, pretty close to the southern border, and one of my classmates was working in a different lab, and he had somebody walk into his lab and ask him if he would make steroids for him. Not an addictive drug, but a performance-enhancing drug. And so it’s not surprising that within Mexico, the cartels are going to chemistry labs at universities to try to recruit chemists to help make molecules for them.”

Mexican cartels release their recruiters onto Mexican university campuses who then target potential recruits. The recruiter interviewed by the New York Times indicated that for a student to be recruited by a cartel, the student had to be ambitious, academically inclined, discrete, and someone who would not be consternated at the idea of working for a cartel. Recruiters will go as far as talking to a student’s family and friends to learn if they would be willing to do that kind of work and in the months spent trying to find potential candidates, few have been targeted.

Some of the students interviewed by the New York Times were experiencing financial stress in their personal lives, pushing them to pursue illicit, but lucrative, work with a cartel. One student’s father had cancer and needed treatment the family could not afford, while another student was the eldest of five children being raised by a single mother. Recruiters offer students twice the salary they could earn from legal employment in Mexico.

Students graduating with a chemistry degree from Carnegie Mellon pursue various careers after graduating. “Roughly 30 to 40 percent of our graduates go on to graduate school to work on a PhD. Maybe another 20 to 30 percent will go to medical school or some other health-related professional school and then the others go into things like the chemical industry, others have gone into consulting jobs,” said Armitage.

“The debt burden is going to be highest for the most expensive schools if they’re not providing a lot of financial aid, but if you’re graduating with a degree from a really expensive school, that degree is probably going to give you entry to a reasonably good paying job or a good graduate school,” Armitage said.

Carnegie Mellon continuously endeavors to mitigate the financial burden arising from tuition costs through programs such as the newly announced Pathways Program, which will be in effect starting in the 2025–26 academic year. “There’s been so much money that the university’s put into financial aid and this new pathways program that they just announced is pretty remarkable in terms of reducing that level of debt even further.”

Something that is particularly surprising about the issue is the recruitment of chemistry students at the undergraduate level. “That’s the real oddity here, I can certainly understand trying to make the precursors for the reason they talked about in the article, but hiring undergrads to do it, I’d be afraid of the lab blowing up because they just don’t have enough experience and knowledge at that point to do it,” Armitage said.

An underlying problem in all of this is drug addiction. “College-age students, or late like high school age students, they’re at that age where they can get access to these substances, but their decision-making ability … hasn’t fully developed yet either, and so you see people at an age where they’re more likely to take risks, but it’s also an age where it’s a lot easier for dependence, and ultimately addiction, to set in,” Armitage said.

“It would be great if no one ever used an addictive substance, but we’d be ignoring millennia of experience by saying that that should be our goal. But if we can just help people understand that the dangers are much higher the younger you are, and say, hey, just wait a few years if you do want to go through an experimental phase, and try to get them to that point,” said Armitage.

Every fall semester, Professor Bruce Armitage teaches a course called “Hooked: The Molecular Basis of Addiction” in which students learn about the molecular mechanisms of addiction arising from the abuse of drugs with a particular focus on the opioid class of narcotics. But the class doesn’t just teach students about the mechanisms of molecular addiction, it also encourages discourse on the role chemistry plays in the opioid epidemic, the ethical responsibility of the pharmaceutical industry, the government regulatory agencies, and private interests that play a role in addiction. “What makes us need something so much that it eclipses the most important aspects of our lives, such as family, friends, work, hobbies, health and wellness?” is a question the course aims to answer.