Inside the fentanyl tunnels: The darkness beneath Las Vegas streets
Away from the glitz and glamour of the Las Vegas strip lies a hidden community of fentanyl addicts, living in tunnels underground. The opioid epidemic has also swept through communities in San Francisco, and now it’s here in the UK.
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In brief…
- Opioid addicts live in storm drains under Las Vegas, in a situation described as “eerie and claustrophobic” by The News Agents during a visit to America’s party city.
- The crisis has ravaged San Francisco too, with the state of some of its streets described by Lewis Goodall as “apocalyptic”.
- Fentanyl has now hit UK streets, with rehab professionals warning of even more potent synthetic opioids causing increasing numbers of death here too.
What’s the story?
Las Vegas is like nowhere else in urban America.
Built amid inhospitable geography, it’s a vertical theme park of neon and hedonism, dazed revellers amble from show to casino and back again.
More striking still, is the stark curbside deprivation in its downtown.
The searing desert heat on the cusp of Death Valley means if you can’t access shade or water or both, it’s game over.
And when it does pour, the waters rush down the valley’s edge into torrent which is why Vegas has an extensive 600 mile labyrinth of storm drains, sparing the city from flooding, and providing shelter for its unhoused, many of whom are addicted to fentanyl.
“I’d go and pick up in there,” our guide Giuseppe Mandell, a former opioid addict, told us. “There’s more scary things than surviving in the tunnels... like getting dope sick.”
It’s thought up to 2,000 people live in the cold, damp tunnels in the pitch black. As we enter, the stench of urine is overwhelming.
“Knock, knock,” Guiseppe calls out into the dark, not knowing if he’ll be answered. He turns to us, as we look at a pile of smashed up shopping carts. “It’s depressing. Just existing day to day.”
We can’t get out of the tunnel fast enough - eerie and claustrophobic - we emerge outside to be greeted by Tim. He’d lived down this very tunnel for nearly three years.
“I smoked fentanyl maybe an hour ago,” he says, shrugging. “Some people are different to me, it’s like they’re possessed almost.”
That ‘possession’ he speaks of is more symptomatic of people who aren’t accustomed to fentanyl’s strength, people who don’t know they’ve taken it, people who’ve aimed to take heroin or cocaine or meth and been spiked by something cheaper and deadlier.
But these drugs haven’t just taken hold in Vegas.
The ‘apocalyptic’ streets of San Francisco
It’s a ubiquitous sight across America’s urban centres - from coast to coast, spanning the length and breadth of the country - the walking dead haunt street corners, vacant lots and car parks, hollowed out to the point of vegetation, brains being hard wiped by a seemingly unstoppable supply of opioids.
In San Francisco, more than 550 miles away, passers-by get on with their day, running errands - it’s an unremarkable sight in daily American life, one which the nation has become numb to for years now.
The coastal city is emblematic of this. A 4x4 grid of blocks in its downtown, the very centre of the Bay Area, one world’s richest regions, overrun by unhoused addicts who have no access to public services, to healthcare, to food or shelter. It’s a stain on the US, one which is heavily polticised.
Our visit to the city’s Tenderloin district was an assault on the senses.
“It’s not a pocket here or a pocket there, it’s everywhere,” Lewis Goodall says on the corner of Jessie and 6th, yards away from police dealing with a dog attack on a homeless person.
“It’s scary just being here, it’s hellish. Apocalyptic.”
We were taken on a guided tour of the community by Urban Alchemy - a non-profit who transform street corners, providing safe spaces in one of the country’s most deprived areas. The security guards who flank us wave over to the addicts, hollering at them to put their drugs down, to stop openly smoking opioids.
“It’s so when we walk through here to take kids to school they understand what they have to do,” Dr. Lisa De La Rue explains.
The scenes we saw in San Fran are famous; it’s the epicentre of the opioid crisis.
And now, it’s come to the UK as well.
Is the UK in the grip of its own opioid crisis?
Traditional street drugs, which have serious side effects themselves, are being cut with synthetic opioids called nitazenes or xylazines, similar to fentanyl but many, many times stronger, leading to spates of overdoses.
“They were never meant for human consumption,” says Molly Howden, the lead nurse at Change Grow Live in Camden, a service providing rehabilitation. “They were found too strong for people to take, it’s only illicit use.”
Synthetic opioid use still isn’t associated with the UK, overshadowed by what we’d seen in the States, but with usage and OD numbers increasing (31 in March 2025 in Camden alone) it’s clear what was once thought of as a uniquely American epidemic is far from it.
“It’s hollowed US life. We in Europe have been inured from it, we didn't have an opioid crisis,” Lewis says.
“If you don't travel to San Francisco, you don't see it. But believe me, you don't want to. And these nitazenes are even darker. So powerful, so easy to make.
“The danger is they take hold in the UK before we even realise.”