Euphoria’s third season just wrapped, closing a storyline steeped in the aesthetics and intensities of the criminal underworld along the US-Mexico border. It touches on several issues that are reshaping the contemporary criminal landscape, from fentanyl trafficking and firearms smuggling to online sex work, social media, and cross-border operations. 

While the series captures surface-level dynamics of these illicit economies, it often ignores the complexity of criminal operations. Here is a breakdown of what the show gets right and wrong about the real organized crime world.

At the start of the third season, protagonist Rue Bennet (played by Zendaya Coleman) is portrayed as a drug courier, smuggling fentanyl across the US-Mexico border while maintaining contact with her supplier and direct boss, Laurie. Although this portrayal draws on recognizable methods of cross-border drug trafficking, it exaggerates the role and autonomy of couriers within organized criminal networks. 

In reality, human transporters are typically low-level, highly replaceable actors within far more complex logistics chains. The bulk of narcotics entering the United States is controlled by transnational criminal organizations operating through compartmentalized networks, where couriers almost never have direct contact with leadership figures. The courier role is especially common for women, who typically raise less suspicion. The majority of female prisoners across Latin America are incarcerated for drug-related offenses, and the size of this prison population has ballooned in recent years. What this season accurately depicts is the dangerous method of body packing: swallowing tightly wrapped drug pellets and later defecating them. Recent cases have even found some women smuggling cocaine inside surgical breast implants.

In the penultimate episode of the season, Rue’s sponsor, Ali Muhammad (played by Colman Domingo), says, “The thing about fentanyl is, why kill the customer? It’s not even happening in other countries. Only in America.” The drug has proliferated in US drug markets not because criminal organizations are strategically trying to reduce their customer base but because the country’s prescription opioid epidemic created a unique demand for a synthetic drug like fentanyl. While the United States remains the main destination for most illicit fentanyl, Ali’s framing is incomplete. Canada and Mexico have seen growing domestic markets for the drug and its precursor chemicals, most commonly trafficked from China and other countries in East and South Asia.

In Episode three, while working part-time as an arms dealer for criminal cowboy Alamo Brown (played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Rue says, “A lot of Americans have feelings about guns, but if it’s any consolation, the majority of the weapons I was selling were headed to Mexico.” Though Mexico has experienced a surge of violence in the last decade, the country does not produce a significant amount of weapons or ammunition. There is only one legal gun store in the country—located on a heavily guarded military base in Mexico City, which is where US firearm dealers find millions of dollars. Nearly 80% of weapons in the country are traced by Mexican authorities to the US buyers and distributors in the United States.

The strip club run by Alamo near the US-Mexico border in Southern California exemplifies many real strip clubs along the international lines that are used as fronts for money laundering and human and drug trafficking. Strip clubs, like other high-cash venues, provide opportunities to commingle illicit revenue with legitimate earnings in environments where accounting is difficult to verify in real time. Like the show depicts, these illicit funds can come from many different markets—arms, drugs, exotic animals, and human trafficking.

This season involves storylines involving online pornography and social media in connection to OnlyFans. Organized crime syndicates are increasingly becoming entangled with OnlyFans, often using the platform for online prostitution, sexual exploitation, and digital recruitment. According to InSight Crime research, they publish fake job offers and social media coercion to entrap vulnerable individuals, including migrants. The platform operates behind a subscription paywall and processes large volumes of decentralized digital transactions, so it can be ideal for laundering illicit funds by making the origin of individual payments more difficult to trace. Money flowing through the digital creator economy has also drawn the attention of organized groups to social media influencers, who present attractive vehicles for laundering schemes. In some cases, criminal networks have leveraged influencers’ high cash flows and lavish lifestyle visibility to obscure the origin of illicit finds without high regulations. But the risks for influencers who are narco-adjacent are high.