| 送交者: peterzhao1212[☆品衔R4☆] 于 2023-11-11 23:44 已读 39 次 |
peterzhao1212的私房频道 |
回答: 鬼趴后续，三句话发帖 由 qxy00 于 2019-10-29 18:55
Also by Ben Westhoff cool18.com
cool18.comOriginal Gangstas: Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, cool18.com
cool18.comEazy-E, Ice Cube, and the Birth of West Coast Rap cool18.com
cool18.comDirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, cool18.com
cool18.comand the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comBEN WESTHOFF cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comFENTANYL, INC. cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comHow Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comCopyright © 2019 by Ben Westhoff cool18.com
cool18.comCever design by David Drummond cool18.com
cool18.comCever photograph © Alamy/David R. Frazier Photolibrary, Inc. cool18.com
cool18.comAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and donot participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com. cool18.com
cool18.comFIRST EDITION cool18.com
cool18.comPublished simultaneously in Canada cool18.com
cool18.comPrinted in Canada cool18.com
cool18.comFirst Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: September 2019 cool18.com
cool18.comDesigned by Norman E. Tuttle of Alpha Design &. Composition cool18.com
cool18.comThis book was set in 12-point Adobe Caslon Pro by cool18.com
cool18.comAlpha Design &. Composition of Pittsfield, NH. cool18.com
cool18.comLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title. cool18.com
cool18.comISBN 978-0-8021-2743-3 cool18.com
cool18.comeISBN 978-0-8021-4795-0 cool18.com
cool18.comAtlantic Monthly Press cool18.com
cool18.coman imprint of Grove Atlantic cool18.com
cool18.com154 West 14th Street cool18.com
cool18.comNew York, NY 10011 cool18.com
cool18.comDistributed by Publishers Group West cool18.com
cool18.comgroveatlantic.com cool18.com
cool18.com19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comIn memory of Michael “Helias” Schafermeyer, inspired artist, generous soul cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comContents cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comCover cool18.com
cool18.comAlso by Ben Westhoff cool18.com
cool18.comTitle Page cool18.com
cool18.comCopyright cool18.com
cool18.comDedication cool18.com
cool18.comIntroduction cool18.com
cool18.comPart I: The New Drugs cool18.com
cool18.comChapter One cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Two cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Three cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Four cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Five cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Six cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Seven cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Eight cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Nine cool18.com
cool18.comPart II: Users and Dealers cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Ten cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Eleven cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Twelve cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Thirteen cool18.com
cool18.comPart III: The Source cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Fourteen cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Fifteen cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Sixteen cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Seventeen cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Eighteen cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Nineteen cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Twenty cool18.com
cool18.comPart IV: A New Approach cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Twenty-One cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Twenty-Two cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Twenty-Three cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Twenty-Four cool18.com
cool18.comChapter Twenty-Five cool18.com
cool18.comEpilogue cool18.com
cool18.comAcknowledgments cool18.com
cool18.comAppendix: Drugs Discussed in This Book cool18.com
cool18.comNotes cool18.com
cool18.comIndex cool18.com
cool18.comBack Cover cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comIntroduction cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comFor Christmas vacation in 2014, Bailey Henke went on a road trip, driving west across the snowy plains of North Dakota. The recent high school graduate departed his apartment in Grand Forks with his roommate, Kain Schwandt. They passed the University of North Dakota, the lumber store, and the town landfill, before the city gave way to farmland. The sky began to open up. cool18.com
cool18.comHenke, who wore a chinstrap beard, put U2 on the stereo and watched the scenery speed by. Prone to goofy sarcasm, he had a way of putting others at ease, of putting on a brave face no matter how he felt inside. He and Schwandt knew that what lay ahead of them on this trip, that it wouldn’t be easy, but they felt optimistic. They weren’t just visiting family members for the holiday. They were traveling with a specific purpose: to get well. cool18.com
cool18.comThe two eighteen-year-old friends had developed opioid addictions. In addition tonasty heroin habits, they had recently become consumed by an even more potent and destructive drug called fentanyl. cool18.com
cool18.comMost people, if they knew of fentanyl at all back then, knew of it as a medicine. Doctors had used it for decades, during surgeries, in epidurals for women during childbirth, and to help cancer patients and others in great pain. But around the time Henke and Schwandt started using it, fentanyl abuse was becoming increasingly common. Like heroin, fentanyl is a derivative of morphine, capable of producing both great pleasure and great suffering—except it can be fifty times stronger than heroin. Even a tiny amount can overwhelm the respiratory system, causing users to stop breathing. cool18.com
cool18.comHenke and Schwandt initially got their fentanyl from medical patches, bought on the black market. The prescription-grade patches were intended to be stuck onto one’s chest or upper arm, to relieve pain, but Henke and Schwandt didn’t use them that way. Instead, they cut them open with a knife and squeezed out the fentanyl gel onto tin foil, and smoked it through a tube. (They didn’t shoot it up because they didn’t like needles.) Later Henke acquired fentanyl in a white powder form that was made illicitly. cool18.com
cool18.comFentanyl gave an incredibly powerful high—unlike anything the teens or their friends had ever experienced. cool18.com
cool18.com“I’d never tried it until Bailey brought some over one day,” Henke’s friend Tanner Gerszewski said. “He showed me a tiny little bit and said, ‘That’s $150 worth.’” Gerszewski thought it was a rip-off until they smoked some together. “I barely even got any smoke, but I was just blown away. I was sweating. I got a call, but couldn’t see the phone well enough to answer it. Heroin is strong stuff, but fentanyl is just completely on another level.” cool18.com
cool18.comEven though Henke had been smoking heroin for some time, fentanyl raised the stakes. He was experiencing a rough patch in his life. Not long before, he had split with his girlfriend after going through her text messages and discovering she was seeing someone else. And though he dreamed of becoming a cop, he had recently dropped out of community college in nearby Devil’s Lake and started working at a local car dealership. Their drug habits were dragging them down, and so he and his close friend Schwandt resolved to get clean, to go through withdrawal on this road trip together, far away from their drug suppliers and their corrosive influences. cool18.com
cool18.comOpioid withdrawal is notoriously difficult, but the two young men had help in the form of Suboxone—a medication designed to help people beat these types of addictions. Perhaps just as important, they had each other. cool18.com
cool18.comStill, they expected roadblocks and soon encountered a literal one in the form of a massive blizzard. Before they could reach Minot, the western North Dakota town to which Bailey’s parents had moved, the roads became almost impassable. Finally a local police officer, taking pity on the travelers, turned on his lights and led a caravan of cars slowly down the highway, and they safely arrived at their destination. While in Minot, they hung out with Henke’s parents, went to the mall, and laughed a lot. cool18.com
cool18.com“We had a really nice Christmas,” said Bailey’s mom, Laura Henke. cool18.com
cool18.comHenke and Schwandt did their best to hide their withdrawal symptoms, which were beginning to kick in. “It was really uncomfortable,” Schwandt said. After Henke’s parents went to bed, they would stay up late and play video games, pilfering some beers or vodka from the liquor cabinet. The booze helped him sleep, Schwandt said, and Henke’s parents were none the wiser. cool18.com
cool18.comIn fact, Laura Henke didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. “As far as I knew, they weren’t using,” she said. The truth is, she had absolutely no idea what her son was up against. She had never even heard of fentanyl. cool18.com
cool18.com“I was clueless,” she told me. cool18.com
cool18.comLaura Henke wasn’t alone. As recently as 2015, very few Americans were familiar with fentanyl. cool18.com
cool18.comAfter the heroin and prescription pill crisis took off in the 1990s and reached epidemic levels in the following decades, heartbreaking reports increasingly appeared about decimated communities, about young victims cut down in their prime. cool18.com
cool18.comYet while civic leaders, law enforcement, and politicians struggled to find answers, fentanyl was quietly creating a brand-new drug epidemic, one that quickly outstripped the previous one and has become more destructive than any drug crisis in American history: worse than crack in the 1980s, worse than meth in the first decade of the 2000s, worse than heroin and prescription pills in the 2010s. “Fentanyl is the deadliest drug in America, CDC confirms,” read a December 2018 CNN headline. cool18.com
cool18.comBecause of its incredible potency, fentanyl is extremely difficult to dose properly. It can be lethal at only two milligrams, an amount barely visible to the eye and far smaller than a dose of heroin. Traffickers “cut” fentanyl into other drugs to give them more kick, unbeknownst to users. Thus, many fentanyl victims think they are taking heroin, cocaine, meth, or prescription pills. But when too much fentanyl is in the mix, it kills almost instantly. cool18.com
cool18.comDriven by fentanyl, overdose drug deaths are, by the time of this book’s publication, for the first time killing more Americans under fifty-five than anything else—more than gun homicides and more than even AIDS during the peak years of the crisis. As of 2017, Americans were statistically more likely to die from an opioid overdose than a car accident. More than seventy thousand Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017 (the most recent year for which statistics were available), and synthetic opioids (mainly fentanyl and its analogues) were responsible for the greatest number of these deaths, more than twenty-eight thousand, compared to about sixteen thousand deaths from heroin overdose and about fifteen thousand from natural and synthetic opioids, including OxyContin (which contains the drug oxycodone). Compared to the previous year, the heroin and prescription opioid numbers were about flat, while synthetic-opioid deaths shot up more than 45 percent. Overdose death rates among African-Americans, middle-aged women, and young people continued to accelerate at alarming rates, with opioid deaths expected to increase 147 percent by 2025. Fentanyl has been cut into heroin for years, but now is often mixed into meth and cocaine, fueling rising death counts for those drugs, a troubling development, considering that Americans are much more likely to try meth and cocaine than heroin. cool18.com
cool18.comIn Canada the numbers are similarly astronomical, and fentanyl deaths have marched upward in Puerto Rico, Australia, and many European countries as well. In 2015 fentanyl and its analogues overtook heroin to become the deadliest drug in Sweden. cool18.com
cool18.com“Today, we are facing the most deadly crisis in America’s history,” then US attorney general Jeff Sessions said during a 2018 press conference. “We’ve never seen anything like it.” cool18.com
cool18.com“Fentanyl is the game changer,” Special Agent in Charge James Hunt of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told Vice. “It’s the most dangerous substance in the history of drug trafficking. Heroin and cocaine pale in comparison to how dangerous fentanyl is.” cool18.com
cool18.comIn addition to fentanyl, a whole new generation of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape. These are known as novel psychoactive substances (NPS), and they include replacements for known drugs like ecstasy, LSD, and marijuana, as well as heroin. These new drugs aren’t grown in a field—or grown at all. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory. There’s nothing natural about them, and they are much more potent than traditional drugs. While the plants that yield the marijuana and heroin consumed in the United States have in recent times been grown in Mexico, these new drugs are most often manufactured in laboratories in China. According to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, China produces over 90 percent of the world’s illicit fentanyl. cool18.com
cool18.comIn 2018, a Brookings Institution report stated: “Replacing drugs derived from plants (e.g., heroin, cannabis) with synthetic analogues (e.g., fentanyl, Spice/K2), could be the most disruptive innovation in the history of the international drug trade.” cool18.com
cool18.comThese new drugs—fake heroin, fake marijuana, fake LSD, and fake ecstasy—represent the harshest drug challenge in our history. And yet, ironically, most of them were “born” in legitimate laboratories, created by medical scientists. Long before they were hijacked by drug traffickers, they were designed to benefit society. It took decades before they landed in the hands of people looking to get high, people like Bailey Henke and Kain Schwandt. cool18.com
cool18.comGrand Forks is an unlikely place to be at the center of a new synthetic-drug wave. A purple dot in a red state—where the locals say “pop” instead of “soda”—it couldn’t be further removed from the world’s drug epicenters. Though it’s one of North Dakota’s biggest cities, Grand Forks is really a small college town at heart, located on the scenic banks of the Red River. Some money from the oil boom on the other side of the state has trickled in, but the town remains quiet. The University of North Dakota’s Fighting Hawks (no longer known as the “Fighting Sioux”) play at their slick hockey arena, and Charlotte’s lefse stand at the farmers market offers a traditional Norwegian treat of mashed potatoes fried on a grill and served like flatbread. cool18.com
cool18.comIt’s the kind of place where locals would sooner make cheerful pleasantries than burden someone with their struggles. Still, its residents have battled drug problems before. Like many Midwestern towns, it was hit hard by methamphetamines, starting in the late 1990s. Homemade labs were prevalent, until police crackdowns, and revised laws banning easy access to the cold medicines favored by crank cooks, drove the labs out. Yet the demand for meth and other hard drugs persisted. The beginning of the 2010s saw the local influx of the first NPS, a new designer chemical known as K2. Often called Spice or synthetic marijuana, K2 has little in common with traditional marijuana, which gives the user a mellow buzz, whereas K2 often makes people’s hearts race, or makes them overdose. Ironically, however, K2 could be bought legally in many places at this time. In fact, a head shop in Grand Forks called Discontent sold it openly. cool18.com
cool18.comOne day while Bailey Henke was in high school, his mother, Laura, found an empty packet of K2 in the house. He lied, denying he had been using it, and instead said it belonged to his buddy Tanner Gerszewski. Suspicious, Henke’s mother forced him to sit down and watch videos of people freaking out while high on synthetic-marijuana strains like K2—which are more accurately called synthetic cannabinoids. Bailey watched as the users screamed and ran around in circles, losing their minds. cool18.com
cool18.comLaura also paid a visit to Gerszewski’s house, just around the corner. “I’m really scared the boys are using this,” she told Tanner’s mom, who seconded her concern and added that she was planning to have her son tested for marijuana. cool18.com
cool18.comLittle did Tanner’s mom know that the threat of these tests was what inspired her son to use K2 in the first place. Unlike traditional marijuana, synthetic cannabinoids don’t show up on drug tests—not the kind parents give to their kids and not the kind instituted by employers. In fact, that’s what made K2 so popular—plus the fact that US lawmakers, since they didn’t yet know what it was, hadn’t made it illegal. cool18.com
cool18.comThere were other benefits too, at least in the eyes of Bailey and Tanner. K2 was potent—their other friends said it made them feel like they were dying—and they personally enjoyed the extra jolt. “That’s what me and Bailey liked,” Gerszewski said. “For us, it didn’t stop at going to a party and drinking and smoking on the weekends. It was about getting fucked up.” cool18.com
cool18.comBut now that he was out of high school and saddled with an opioid addiction, Henke resolved to get his life together. On the December 2014 road trip, after visiting Henke’s parents in Minot, they drove out to see Kain Schwandt’s family in Montana. It was a good time, and as they drove back eastward they congratulated themselves on accomplishing their goal. “We had both gotten clean,” said Schwandt. cool18.com
cool18.comAround the same time in 2014, in Portland, Oregon, a woman named Channing Lacey was sliding into her stiletto heels. The twenty-seven-year-old mother of two worked as a dominatrix, controlling a stable of male slaves she had met on the Internet. Bespectacled and clad in black leather and fishnet stockings, she would beat them with whips, step on them with her high heels, or even apply clothespins—which were attached to a rope—all over their bodies and then rip them off with a flick of the rope. For the privilege, men would pay $150 to $200 an hour. cool18.com
cool18.comLacey enjoyed her dominatrix alter ego. “I was into it,” she said. “It got a bunch of my aggression out.” This work was an escape from the rest of her life, which was becoming increasingly consumed by fentanyl. She was not only hooked on it but was assisting in what might have been, at the time, the country’s biggest illicit fentanyl operation. cool18.com
cool18.comGrowing up in Las Vegas, Lacey had dropped out of high school and gotten pregnant, in 2004, at age seventeen. After her son was born she was prescribed the opioid Vicodin and soon became addicted to pain pills. She began “doctor shopping” to get her fix. “I’d go to hospitals, I’d go to dentists, I’d get different prescriptions,” she said, including those for OxyContin, an even stronger opioid. “I manipulated the system really bad.” She even went so far as to marry a man in order to get on his health insurance. cool18.com
cool18.comLacey moved to the Portland area around 2005, and a year or so later descended further into drug abuse, using meth and heroin. She got clean and had a second son but then went back to heroin in the early 2010s, using more heavily than before. Her habit led her to a dope house in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, where she met an intriguing man named Brandon Hubbard. Though he was more than ten years her senior, Lacey found in him a kindred spirit. Short, with brown hair and a piercing stare, Hubbard also loved BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism) and possessed what Lacey considered to be a fierce intelligence. “His IQ level is genius,” she said. cool18.com
cool18.comHubbard was also hooked on pain pills. His right arm was paralyzed from an injury sustained while riding a bike years earlier, and he had been prescribed heavy doses of OxyContin. Eventually he moved to street heroin, which was cheaper. cool18.com
cool18.comCaught up in a druggy, infatuated haze, Hubbard and Lacey became joined at the hip. “We were together every day after that,” Lacey said, adding that her mother, who lived nearby, looked after her kids. “I was a really bad addict. I was out of control.” cool18.com
cool18.comDespite her dexterity with a whip, Lacey didn’t hold a steady job, and Hubbard wasn’t really working either. To feed their heroin addictions, Hubbard sold his OxyContin pills. It was a small-time drug hustle, and he soon shifted to selling black tar heroin, working with a local man who had a reliable connection and a good price. cool18.com
cool18.comHubbard’s business really took off, however, when he moved onto the Dark Web around 2013. This disguised Internet protocol was quickly helping local dealers like Hubbard become wealthy, international players. And it was enabling tech-savvy teenagers to get potent drugs delivered right to their front door by the mail carrier. cool18.com
cool18.comIn the past, to obtain illicit drugs, a buyer often had to meet up with a dealer in an alleyway or on a dangerous street corner. But as of the early 2010s one doesn’t even have to leave the bedroom; it’s as easy as booting up a smartphone or laptop. To access the Dark Web, one needs a special browser, such as Tor, which disguises one’s location and identity and makes it possible to load Dark Web sites. Because these sites have hidden IP addresses, it’s almost impossible to figure out who’s running them. cool18.com
cool18.comNot everyone on the Dark Web is a criminal. Facebook even has a presence, to circumvent censors in countries where it’s banned, like China. But the Dark Web is best known for its illegal emporiums, which run the gamut from extremely untrustworthy to quite professional, and sell almost every form of vice imaginable: credit card numbers, fake Rolexes, pornography passwords, weapons, and malware. “Make $3,000+ a Month as Fake Uber Driver,” read one recent listing. It’s stunningly easy to buy drugs—and not just traditional drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana, but powerful NPS like fentanyl and K2. cool18.com
cool18.comThe most famous of these markets, Silk Road, was founded by a Libertarian-leaning, magic-mushroom selling, tech autodidact named Ross Ulbricht and rapidly became a billion-dollar enterprise. Using sophisticated programming techniques to cover his tracks, Ulbricht established Silk Road in 2011 and eluded law enforcement for more than two years. (A rogue DEA agent, selling him tips for $50,000 each, helped him evade capture.) Growing increasingly paranoid and allegedly commissioning six murders, Ulbricht was finally arrested at a San Francisco library in 2013 and eventually sentenced to life in prison. In Silk Road’s stead, another Dark Web behemoth called AlphaBay grew to be even bigger, until it too was shut down, in 2017. cool18.com
cool18.comBut new markets keep sprouting up. They are really not much different from Amazon, right down to the reviews of sellers. Customers select their wares, give an address, and pay by Bitcoin—the cyber currency preferred by these markets because it’s difficult to trace. Their discreetly wrapped items arrive soon after in the mail. cool18.com
cool18.comBrandon Hubbard utilized the Dark Web and got rich. At first he sold heroin. His vendor name on Dark Web sites such as Evolution and Agora was “PdxBlack,” referencing Portland’s airport code and his product—black tar heroin, a sticky strain known for its dark impurities and common on the West Coast. Channing Lacey helped him package up the product. cool18.com
cool18.comHubbard prided himself on keeping prices low, and soon orders began pouring in from around the country. He touted his own success on Reddit, a forum commonly used by Internet drug traders, claiming to be on his way to becoming the “BTH King of the Dark Net!” cool18.com
cool18.comFentanyl only upped the ante. Lacey said they first encountered the drug in 2014, when Hubbard received a package from someone he had been chatting with on the website Topix. The drug knocked Lacey and Hubbard on their backs. “I did a pinhead, or maybe a bit more, and I overdosed right away,” she remembered, adding that this only increased its appeal. “In the drug addict’s mindset you’re like, ‘This stuff is fucking amazing,’ because it’s so much stronger than heroin.” cool18.com
cool18.comWith longtime use, heroin doesn’t continue to make users feel euphoric; it simply eases withdrawal symptoms. Many are drawn to fentanyl because it brings the euphoria back. “Heroin wouldn’t even get me past sick anymore,” said Bree, an addicted user from East Alton, Illinois, who prefers not to use her real name. “But fentanyl would always get me completely off sick, and high, and it always took less.” cool18.com
cool18.comFor dealers, the appeal of fentanyl is also clear: it is cheaper and more discreet, since it comes in smaller packages than heroin. And so Brandon Hubbard began ordering more. His main source was a distributor named Daniel Vivas Ceron. Originally from Colombia, Ceron had come to Canada as a child; the fact that he was currently locked up in a Quebec prison for attempted murder somehow didn’t slow him down. cool18.com
cool18.comAllegedly working from prison with another incarcerated man, Ceron didn’t touch the fentanyl himself, but since he somehow had access to the Dark Web in prison, he didn’t have to. Using aliases, including Joe Bleau, and acting as a middleman, he ordered fentanyl from China and then paid someone on the outside to complete the transaction. Ceron’s cut from a sale might be $10,000, while his co-conspirator on the outside might get $7,000. cool18.com
cool18.comOnce the package from Ceron arrived, Lacey helped Hubbard bag up the portions and prepare the product for shipment. They cut it with mannitol, a diuretic and laxative that counters the constipation that often comes from opioid use. It also increased their profit margins. The product was a hit, and Hubbard and Ceron were in touch frequently, texting each other using encryption programs that scramble messages and make them harder for law enforcement to read. cool18.com
cool18.comBefore long, Hubbard claimed to be the biggest illicit fentanyl dealer in the country—and Lacey believed him. “He was moving a lot of packages,” she said, and his customers were paying huge quantities of Bitcoin, which he exchanged for hard cash. He was careful not to live too lavishly—he wanted to stay under the radar of law enforcement—but he splurged on some things, like a new Volkswagen GTI. cool18.com
cool18.comIn November 2014, Hubbard placed an order with Ceron for 750 grams of fentanyl. Since that is less than a kilo, it might not sound like a lot, but considering a pinhead can cause an overdose, it was a colossal shipment, with a street value of $1.5 million. What Hubbard didn’t realize was that law enforcement was on to him, having accessed the account of a boy who had purchased fentanyl from him on a Dark Web site called Evolution. Homeland Security was monitoring his activities. cool18.com
cool18.comAlmost immediately after Bailey Henke and Kain Schwandt returned from their road trip they fell off the wagon. Despite their efforts to quit fentanyl, they couldn’t stay clean long. It didn’t help that the day of their return was New Year’s Eve, and everyone was partying. Henke had some drinks that night and took some Xanax. On January 2, 2015 he went on an even bigger bender. cool18.com
cool18.comThe new calendar brought brutally cold weather to Grand Forks. The temperature hit fifteen degrees Fahrenheit that day and the next day dropped a full thirty degrees farther. Henke and Schwandt stayed out of the cold and entertained themselves by doing drugs and playing video games. With another friend they went to the house of a local dealer named Ryan Jensen. In his bedroom, they played Call of Duty and smoked fentanyl. cool18.com
cool18.comNineteen-year-old Jensen was under house arrest at the time, having been convicted of drunk driving. Formerly the neighborhood pot dealer, Jensen had become a Dark Web expert himself, procuring substances right off his computer. (To be safe, he had the packages sent to the address of a guy he knew in town.) Using the Dark Web site Evolution, Jensen ordered twelve grams of heroin and one gram of fentanyl from a dealer named PdxBlack—Brandon Hubbard. Of that one gram, he sold a quarter to Henke. cool18.com
cool18.comYet this was different than the pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl Henke usually smoked, the kind extracted from medical patches. This was white powder fentanyl. Since it had been cut with mannitol, it was impossible to know exactly how potent it was. Nonetheless, while playing video games that January 2, Henke was hitting it hard. cool18.com
cool18.comStill, he seemed to be OK, and soon afterward Kain Schwandt agreed to drop him off at Tanner Gerszewski’s garden-level apartment, in a squat building with stained green carpeting by a trailer park. Since the days when the teens had smoked K2 together in high school, Gerszewski’s drug habit had grown worse as well. Though he maintained a job as a plumber, he was hooked on heroin and had already smoked some by the time Henke arrived, in addition to drinking and dropping acid. Still, Henke seemed to be even more intoxicated than his friend, and he threw up immediately upon walking in the door. cool18.com
cool18.comHenke was clearly affected, but this didn’t especially faze Gerszewski. “He seemed high, but he didn’t seem in bad shape,” he said. “Me and him had seen each other all through high school in very bad states—fucked up, throwing up.” cool18.com
cool18.comThey dipped into the fentanyl Henke had bought from Jensen, and powered up the Xbox to play a mixed martial arts video game. A few other people Gerszewski knew were there too, but they left at some point, leaving the two friends alone with their drugs. As midnight approached, Henke’s energy flagged. In the midst of their game, Gerszewski noticed that Henke’s avatar had stopped moving. His friend looked like he was nodding off. cool18.com
cool18.comHenke insisted he was fine. They continued playing until, again, Henke’s avatar stopped moving. “I’m just a little tired,” Henke said. cool18.com
cool18.comWhen his character froze again, Gerszewski saw that Henke’s eyes were shut and he was growing pale. He tapped him, and then nudged him, getting no response. Gerszewski feared Henke had overdosed, but was so high himself that he had a hard time reading the situation. Was this a dream? Was Henke faking it? He grabbed and shook him. cool18.com
cool18.comNow realizing the depth of the problem, Gerszewski made a mistake. Instead of immediately calling 911, he called Schwandt, who came over and attempted CPR. When an ambulance finally arrived, it was too late. cool18.com
cool18.comJust after midnight, Bailey Henke was pronounced dead. About three hours later a police officer knocked on his parents’ door in Minot. He told them the bad news, but Laura and Jason Henke couldn’t get to Grand Forks until the next evening to begin the mourning process. Another big snowstorm had closed down the highway. cool18.com
cool18.comBailey Henke’s death triggered the widest-ranging fentanyl investigation in history. Known as Operation Denial, it’s an international endeavor begun in 2015 and still ongoing at the time this book went to print, involving agencies from the local Grand Forks police department to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the US Border Patrol and the DEA. It has tracked down people from every step in the fentanyl supply chain that killed Henke and charged thirty-two. cool18.com
cool18.comThese include Ryan Jensen, who in 2016 received a prison sentence of twenty years for charges including drug distribution resulting in death; Brandon Hubbard, who that year received life in prison; and Daniel Vivas Ceron, who was still awaiting trial. Investigators believe Hubbard earned millions from his Dark Web sales of fentanyl and heroin, and that his collaboration with Ceron was responsible for twelve fentanyl overdose victims and four deaths around the country, including Bailey Henke and another Grand Forks teenager, nineteen-year-old Evan Poitra, who died in July 2014. Others on the periphery of the wide-ranging case were convicted as well, including Kain Schwandt, who spent about a year and a half behind bars, for conspiracy to possess illicit drugs with intent to distribute, and Channing Lacey, who snuck in fentanyl when she went to jail and distributed it there, causing a fatal overdose. She received eleven years for drug distribution resulting in death. For its efforts, in November 2018, Operation Denial received special recognition from the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. cool18.com
cool18.comYet for all of Operation Denial’s convictions, it has not been able to snag the person at the very top of the drug pyramid, Jian Zhang, the Chinese man who is believed to have manufactured the fentanyl that killed Henke and others. Zhang is a chemical manufacturer born in 1978 and operating out of Shanghai. His company claims to make benign food additives, including spices and soy products, but in April, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to Fargo to unseal an indictment against Zhang, accusing him of leading a drug ring that manufactured fentanyl sold throughout the United States. The indictment listed eleven states, including North Dakota and Oregon. cool18.com
cool18.comZhang has been pursued with the full weight of not just the US Department of Justice but also the Treasury, which designated him a kingpin under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, blocking his US financial assets and those of his company, Zaron Bio-Tech (Asia) Limited. “Combating the flow of fentanyl into the United States is a top priority of this administration,” Sigal Mandelker, under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement. “This action will disrupt the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into the United States.” cool18.com
cool18.comYet the United States couldn’t jail Jian Zhang, because China refused to turn him over. The country has no extradition treaty with the United States, and China does not believe Zhang to be a criminal. Yu Haibin, director of precursor chemical control at China’s Narcotics Control Commission, said that although the country’s police were investigating Zhang, they did not have “solid evidence” that he broke Chinese law. Further, Chinese officials are quick tonote, most NPS were invented in labs in Europe and the United States. And this isn’t just a problem of production—it’s one of consumption. China believes America needs to control its drug problem. cool18.com
cool18.comConsidering that fentanyl has been banned (except for medical use) in China for decades, it’s unclear why China could not, or simply did not, prosecute Zhang. But there’s an even bigger problem. Many of the other NPS killing Americans, Europeans, and others are still 100 percent legal in China, even while banned in the West. In recent years, some of the biggest new drug kingpins can’t be successfully prosecuted. The Pablo Escobars of today are coming out of China, and they don’t have to worry about being imprisoned by their government. They can often operate free and in the clear, within the boundaries of their country’s own laws. Whenever a deadly new drug is made illegal in China, manufacturers simply tweak its chemical structure and start producing a new drug that is still legal. Many fentanyl analogues and synthetic cannabinoids have been made this way. Though Chinese authorities have pledged to crack down—and in April, 2019, said they would ban all fentanyl analogues—their efforts so far have barely dented the country’s clandestine international trade. cool18.com
cool18.comThe rise of fentanyl and NPS happened quickly. When I started investigating these new drugs in 2013, fentanyl wasn’t on the public radar at all. I had never heard of it. In fact, I only came to this story by accident. cool18.com
cool18.comLiving in Los Angeles at the time, as the music editor at LA Weekly, I was investigating why so many people were dying at raves. Electronic dance music (EDM) had recently exploded in popularity, and with its rise came increasing deaths, mostly young kids experimenting with ecstasy. cool18.com
cool18.comI wasn’t new to the scene. In the late 1990s I partied in abandoned San Francisco warehouses and deserted beach spots as part of the first wave of American electronic dance music—people then called it electronica. These events were usually populated only by those who had garnered a personal invitation from a friend of the organizer; to get directions one had to call a secret phone line. On the scene, maybe a few dozen people would dance to cutting-edge, drum-machine-driven beats. The drugs, ecstasy and LSD, made participants especially appreciate exotic rhythms. These ravers and club kids wore fluorescent colors and giant goggles and chewed on pacifiers or breathed Vicks VapoRub beneath surgical masks to enhance the sensation of ecstasy. cool18.com
cool18.comI, along with most Americans, dropped out of the scene by the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. EDM’s popularity continued unabated in Europe, while in the United States many stars saw their music fall off the charts. But by the 2010s electronic dance music was back and bigger than ever, drawing tens of thousands of neon-clad kids to raves. The new raves couldn’t have been more different from the underground parties I had attended. No longer secret affairs featuring obscure sounds, today’s EDM events feature celebrity DJs spinning in mammoth venues such as stadiums and racetracks. Electric Daisy Carnival, now held every spring in Las Vegas, draws some four hundred thousand attendees. In the music industry, which had been decimated by audio-sharing services and still hadn’t recovered in the early 2010s, EDM was a shining star, awash in profits and adored by millions of young fans. And Los Angeles was the center of its universe. EDM was being celebrated in the national media as a big neon party that never ended. cool18.com
cool18.comAnd then I heard about the deaths. cool18.com
cool18.comIn 2010, fifteen-year-old Sasha Rodriguez fatally overdosed at Electric Daisy Carnival at the LA Coliseum, reportedly from ecstasy. Local politicians revolted, and the event was forced to relocate to Las Vegas. A Plymouth State University student named Brittany Flannigan overdosed and died in late August 2013 after attending a Boston EDM concert featuring the popular DJ Zedd, and just days later a University of Virginia student named Mary “Shelley” Goldsmith passed away as well. Both were nineteen, and reports said they had taken “Molly.” cool18.com
cool18.comAt the time, many believed Molly was pure MDMA, the drug found in ecstasy, also known as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. But this didn’t seem right. The Molly users I witnessed dipped their fingers into a plastic bag of white powder and then licked it off, repeating the process every ten minutes or so. Some would snort it. This was different from my heyday on the rave scene. Back then, the ravers I knew simply took a pill and would be happily rolling for the whole night. cool18.com
cool18.comWith mega-raves came increasing numbers of casualties. At New York’s Electric Zoo over Labor Day weekend in 2013, a twenty-year-old University of New Hampshire student named Olivia Rotondo and a twenty-three-year-old recent graduate of Syracuse University named Jeffrey Russ both collapsed and died, reportedly after taking Molly. At the Hard Summer festival in August 2015, outside Los Angeles, two young women fatally overdosed and forty-nine people had to be taken to emergency rooms. The event sparked a Los Angeles Times article quoting emergency-room doctors as saying that raves on LA-county-owned property should be banned, at least temporarily. “If the county wants to make money while people are dying and medically compromised,” said Dr. Philip Fagan Jr., emergency department director at Los Angeles’s Good Samaritan Hospital, “they should come out and say it.” cool18.com
cool18.comThese weren’t just freak accidents. The more I covered the EDM scene, the more I realized how widespread the fatalities were. Six people overdosed and died at a single EDM festival in Malaysia in 2014, while just about every major US EDM concert—including Electric Daisy Carnival, Nocturnal Wonderland, Together as One, Monster Massive, Coachella, Ultra, and Electric Forest—saw festival-goers die from drug use. No statistics were available about the number of deaths at EDM festivals. But no one could dispute a disturbing fact: the number was growing. cool18.com
cool18.comOfficials blamed ecstasy—a word many used synonymously with Molly—but that contradicts the relatively benign nature of the chemical. “You don’t see many ecstasy overdose deaths,” confirmed Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe, a Denver-based organization dedicated to harm reduction at music festivals and other events. He estimates that MDMA deaths per year in the United States number around twenty—not just kids at raves, but everyone—which is a tiny fraction of total drug deaths. Further, large numbers of the MDMA deaths weren’t brought about because users’ dosages were too high, he adds, but because they suffered from heatstroke, from dancing continuously without drinking water or wearing themselves out beneath the hot sun. cool18.com
cool18.comMolly, however, is not ecstasy as it has been known. “Molly means, like, anything now,” a Dallas toxicologist named Ashley Haynes warned. It might contain a small amount of MDMA but most likely contains a hodgepodge of bizarre drugs with complicated chemical names users have never heard of, including so-called “bath salts.” It turns out, she added, that there are hundreds of these new drugs. Almost every traditional drug—be it marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, or heroin—is being replaced by new, sinister versions made in laboratories. cool18.com
cool18.comFurther, as I discovered, they were being distributed in new ways, like the Dark Web, leading to an entirely upended drug landscape that nobody seemed to understand—not the parents of children who had lost their lives, not first responders, not cops, and certainly not politicians. The people consuming many of these bastardized types of speed, psychedelics, and other substances are not traditional hard-drug users. They are high school kids, college students, and recreational enthusiasts best described as drug nerds. Some know what they are doing, using sophisticated Internet forums to expand their minds and explore intellectual pursuits. A great many, however, have no idea just how potent and dangerous these new drugs can be. cool18.com
cool18.comNPS are hard to spot, as they can come as powders, crystals, pills, or liquids, resembling traditional drugs, or even sprayed onto dried sage to be smoked like marijuana. Sometimes they are even professionally packaged and sold in stores, mislabeled as “bath salts” or “potpourri.” cool18.com
cool18.comThese new drugs aren’t just confounding users. In recent years, law enforcement agencies have seized exponentially larger quantities of NPS, but this is a drop in the bucket. By the time police get wise to these chemicals, rogue manufacturers have already moved on tonew formulas, because when it comes to creating synthetic drugs, the mathematical possibilities are endless. By varying a molecule just slightly, rogue chemists can come up with a whole new drug, one that is still legal because it hasn’t yet been scheduled (controlled and restricted). After the chemicals sold as K2 and Spice were banned, for example, a whole new set of fake marijuana blends immediately popped up in their place. cool18.com
cool18.com“Over the past several years, the DEA has identified hundreds of designer drugs from at least eight different drug classes,” DEA special agent Elaine Cesare observed. “There are a seemingly infinite number of possible new chemical compounds that are on the horizon.” cool18.com
cool18.comMany law enforcement officers use the same expression when describing their attempts to stop these drugs: a game of whack-a-mole. Whenever one new drug is contained, another simply pops up in its place. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has called the synthetics industry “hydra-headed.” “When you control one derivative of fentanyl, another derivative comes out, which is not on the control list. Criminals are always one step ahead of law enforcement,” said Tun Nay Soe, of the UNODC. cool18.com
cool18.comThis book is the result of my interviews with 160 people, visits to drug sites and laboratories all over the world, and research drawn from hundreds of source materials. In some cases, often to preserve their own safety, subjects have requested I use pseudonyms; they are identified as such in the text. cool18.com
cool18.comWhile reporting the story of NPS, I met people suffering from fentanyl and other drug addictions, some destitute and living on the streets, others functioning in well-paid jobs. I spent time with psychonauts, thrill seekers who try brand-new drugs that have never been taken before. I learned how these chemicals are marketed and sold, from the factories to the streets to the search engine. I spent months on every step of the drug-distribution ladder, with everyone from low-level dealers to big-time traffickers, from the industrial manufacturers to the inventors of the drugs themselves. I went back over the details of my close friend Michael “Helias” Schafermeyer’s death in Baltimore, from fentanyl combined with alcohol, in 2010—long before I knew what fentanyl was. cool18.com
cool18.comI consulted politicians, police, DEA agents, and international drug policy makers, who would like to put these traffickers away forever; and I spoke with counselors, doctors, activists, and policy wonks, some of whom believe these drugs should be legal. I corresponded with two infamous, now-imprisoned LSD kingpins who worked together out of an abandoned missile silo in Kansas; the demise of their operation in 2000 may have inadvertently fueled the rise of a new hallucinogen whose effects are far worse than LSD. cool18.com
cool18.comI learned how a brilliant Belgian chemist created a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company from scratch but in the process unleashed a horror like nothing ever seen before. I prowled dangerous St. Louis streets with an armed former fentanyl dealer to understand how the epidemic started, tracing the history to Mexican cartel affiliates who traveled north to spread what had originated in China into inner cities all over the United States. cool18.com
cool18.comFinally, I infiltrated a pair of Chinese drug operations, one a sophisticated laboratory operation distilling outsize quantities of the world’s most dangerous chemicals in industrial-size glassware, and the other an office of young, cheery salespeople, who sat in rows of cubicles and sold fentanyl ingredients to American dealers and Mexican cartels. cool18.com
cool18.comThe latter company didn’t even bother operating clandestinely, instead doing its business out in the open. That’s because, as I soon learned, the Chinese government offers subsidies and tax rebates to chemical companies that are making these drugs. It’s a case of financial incentives gone horribly wrong—one that seems likely to drive a further wedge between two powerful countries that are already extremely wary of each other. cool18.com
cool18.com“We need to make very clear to the Chinese, that this is an act of war. You are sending this into our country to kill our people,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who headed President Trump’s opioid epidemic commission, in the fall of 2017, speaking about fentanyl. China is “sending that garbage and killing our people,” added President Trump, at an August 2018 cabinet meeting. “It’s almost a form of warfare.” cool18.com
cool18.comThe former director of the DEA’s Special Operations Division, Derek Maltz, used stark terms to describe the fentanyl-driven opioid epidemic. “Where it becomes a national security emergency is the connectivity between the drug traffickers and the terrorists that are out there that are trying to destroy our way of life,” he said in November 2018. cool18.com
cool18.comSuch rhetoric aside, America’s problem with fentanyl and other new drugs undermines its national security as much as—perhaps more than—any other issue in the headlines, with the wrecking of families and relationships, the massive casualty toll, and the billions needed to fight the scourge. Many American political and thought leaders have castigated China’s negligence; some even believe it is purposeful. cool18.com
cool18.comAddressing the problem is extremely complicated, however, because this is a story that goes well beyond drugs. It’s a political story about the clashing of the world’s biggest superpowers. It’s an economics story about the deception of giant pharmaceutical companies. It’s a higher-education story about how university science can go horribly wrong. It’s a tech story about incredible innovation happening in real time, a business story about marketing genius. It’s a physiological and philosophical story about the human body in conflict with the human mind. cool18.com
cool18.comAnd it’s forcing us to rethink our assumptions. The drug economy no longer just benefits the producers and dealers. Nowadays it involves the otherwise innocent people who deliver our mail, who program Internet algorithms, who design medicine in chemistry labs, who scrub toilets at drug companies. cool18.com
cool18.comMore than anything, this is a story of global capitalism run amok. The new-drugs trade is growing for the same reasons the world economy is growing—increasing speed of communications, Internet technology, and shipping; relaxed barriers to trade; and, of course, the ever-present pressure for higher profit margins. And if global capitalism is hard to control, the new-drugs trade is nearly impossible, given that it is peopled by local actors in jurisdictions with no overlap interacting with far-flung markets and supply chains. cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comPart I: cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comThe New Drugs cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comOne cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comAmericans have used and abused opiates* for as long as America has existed. Opium was administered to Revolutionary War soldiers, and for much of our history it was one of the only medicines available, given to colicky babies, the dying elderly, and everyone in between. Misuse may even have been more common in previous centuries than now, and the problem grew particularly acute after the Civil War, during which morphine was used to soothe the injured. In fact, the term soldier’s disease was coined to describe opiate addiction. At the dawn of the twentieth century, one could buy opium from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, yet addiction was so widespread that President Theodore Roosevelt appointed an opium commissioner in 1908. During the industrial revolution the problem ravaged the United Kingdom as well, and the country sought to balance its trade deficit by using its British East India Company to ply opium in tremendous quantities to the Chinese, causing a pair of wars. cool18.com
cool18.comNever, however, has an opiate—or any other drug, for that matter—killed so many annually as the fentanyl epidemic. It is the next phase in the opioid crisis that began with the overprescription of opioid painkillers, which was catalyzed by a short letter published in a 1980 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Written by a doctor named Hershel Jick and his graduate student, Jane Porter, the letter discussed the thousands of cases they had examined in which patients received opioid narcotics. In only four cases had anyone become addicted, they claimed, and only one of those was troubling. “We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.” cool18.com
cool18.comThe above sentence was one of only five in Jick and Porter’s letter, which was far from comprehensive. It referenced only patients who received small doses and were closely monitored by their doctors, not outpatients taking home bottles of ultra-strong prescription drugs. Nonetheless, the letter had great influence; academics cited it in more than six hundred studies, and doctors and pharmaceutical companies pitching their products deferred to it as well. cool18.com
cool18.comDuring the 1990s another sea change swept American medicine: the desire to treat patients more humanely. Traditionally, doctors focused on four “vital signs” when caring for patients: their temperature, breathing rate, blood pressure, and pulse rate. But in the mid-1990s the American Pain Society called for pain to be considered a new “fifth vital sign.” Whereas doctors were previously reticent to prescribe opioids because they considered them addictive, the ramifications of the Jick-Porter letter caused their thinking to shift: if opioids were, in fact, safe, patients should not be consigned to agony. “It was not only okay, but it was our holy mission, to cure the world of its pain by waking people up to the fact that opiates were safe,” Boston pain specialist Dr. Nathaniel Katz told journalist Sam Quinones for his book Dreamland: The True Tale Of America’s Opiate Epidemic, describing the new conventional wisdom that took hold. “All those rumors of addiction were misguided…. My fellowship director even told me, ‘If you have pain, you can’t get addicted to opiates because the pain soaks up the euphoria.’” cool18.com
cool18.comThe Sackler family, the owners of the company responsible for OxyContin, became billionaires many times over thanks to this new perspective. Long before the drug’s creation, Arthur Sackler, a physician by training, had been a pioneer in the field of pharmaceutical advertising. In 1952, Arthur and his brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, purchased the company that became Purdue Pharma. With the inherent conflict of advertising and pharmaceuticals in its DNA, Purdue brought OxyContin to market in 1996, touting its benefits as a slow-release pill that contained high doses of the opioid oxycodone—contin means “continuous.” Since the pills lasted twelve hours, the company claimed, patients would need only two per day, fewer than comparable medicines. Addiction, it promised, was extremely rare. cool18.com
cool18.comPurdue launched a huge marketing blitz, deploying hundreds of salespeople to sway doctors and dispense free promotional items, including pedometers, headgear, and even an OxyContin-branded music CD, Swing Is Alive, with a pair of dancing geriatrics on the cover. Purdue sent doctors to tropical locations for “pain management seminars;” those who attended these events in 1996 were more than twice as likely to write OxyContin prescriptions as doctors who did not. Although originally OxyContin was promoted for use by cancer patients, according to internal reports, the company saw that market as too small. Annual sales might top out around $260 million, whereas if Purdue was able to sell to patients with a host of chronic conditions, the annual market was closer to $1.3 billion. Sales rose from just under $50 million in 1996 to more than $1 billion by 2000. Oxycodone became the most prescribed drug in the United States. cool18.com
cool18.comYet for many patients, the dosages didn’t last an entire half day, and they began experiencing withdrawal symptoms when the pills wore off hours early. And while Purdue salespeople told doctors that less than 1 percent of OxyContin patients would become addicted, Purdue’s own study from 1999 found the rate to be 13 percent. cool18.com
cool18.comMisuse became rampant. Many users crushed the pills, known by some as “hillbilly heroin,” into powder form to snort or make into an injectable solution, so they could get high faster. Others fashioned themselves into drug dealers and sold them; the going rate on the street for OxyContin was one dollar per milligram, meaning that an eighty-milligram pill sold for eighty dollars. cool18.com
cool18.comFor some, using OxyContin as directed caused anguish. Patients recovering from knee surgery or a root canal, or experiencing chronic pain from a condition like rheumatoid arthritis, gained temporary relief but soon confronted a new problem: when their prescription ran out, they were addicted. Many tried to “doctor shop” for more pills, but some who couldn’t do that, or couldn’t afford the pills, turned to heroin, which is cheaper—as low as five dollars a dose in some places—and satisfied their opioid cravings. Before they knew it, they were regularly visiting dangerous parts of town to meet heroin dealers. cool18.com
cool18.comThis is a complex problem. The vast majority of legitimate users of OxyContin and other opioid medicines receive the intended benefit. For the most part, people dying from oxycodone overdoses tend to get the pills on the black market, not their doctors. Nonetheless, Purdue bears “the lion’s share” of the blame for America’s opioid crisis, according to Andrew Kolodny, the codirector of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University. “If you look at the prescribing trends for all the different opioids, it’s in 1996 that prescribing really takes off,” Kolodny said, referencing the year OxyContin debuted. “It’s not a coincidence. That was the year Purdue launched a multifaceted campaign that misinformed the medical community about the risks.” The company, found guilty of playing down OxyContin’s abuse potential, paid $600 million in fines in 2007. Considering the billions it had earned, and would continue to earn, this seemed a pittance. No one from the company received jail time, causing then US senator Arlen Specter, from Pennsylvania, to take issue with the sentence. “I see fines with some frequency and think that they are expensive licenses for criminal misconduct,” he said at a Senate hearing. “I donot know whether that applies in this case, but a jail sentence is a deterrent and a fine is not.” cool18.com
cool18.comIn 2010 Purdue released a new version of OxyContin that couldn’t be crushed up and injected, which the company believed would help stymie abuse. The FDA agreed. However, this new pill may have worsened the opioid crisis. In a 2015 study, psychiatrists at Washington University in St. Louis interviewed 244 people who had sought treatment for addiction to the new version of OxyContin. The study showed that while many were able to kick their OxyContin habit, about one-third of the subjects migrated to other drugs. Seven out of ten in this group started taking heroin. Further, in the early 2010s, prescription narcotics became harder to obtain. This, along with heroin shortages, likely accelerated fentanyl use in the United States, concluded a 2018 study at the University of California, San Francisco. (Fentanyl is an odd case, the UC San Francisco researchers noted, since its rise wasn’t driven because people wanted it—they just feared withdrawal and didn’t have access to other opioids. As one indication of this, unlike most drugs, which develop street names—smack, weed, Molly—fentanyl doesn’t have much in the way of nicknames.) cool18.com
cool18.comCharges have also mounted against Insys Therapeutics, makers of the prescription fentanyl spray Subsys. The company has been sued by many parties, including state governments and individual patients, and its executives have been indicted (and in some cases pled guilty) of bribing doctors to prescribe Subsys. The spray is approved only for cancer patients, but individual doctors have been accused of prescribing it for lesser ailments and accepting gratuitous kickbacks. A former Insys sales rep named Maria Guzman detailed in her 2013 whistleblower lawsuit that the company provided doctors with stock options, trips to a gun range, fancy dinners, and even hired a woman specifically “to have sexual relations with doctors in exchange for Subsys prescriptions.” The FDA had information about doctors prescribing Subsys and other fentanyl medications for noncancer patients but did little to stop it, according to documents obtained by Johns Hopkins public-health researchers. cool18.com
cool18.comOperating under the public radar as the crisis ramped up were drug distributors like Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and McKesson, which filled gigantic opioid prescription orders from corrupt doctors operating pill mills. For example, a drugstore in the small West Virginia town of Kermit (population: four hundred) received nine million hydrocodone pills in only two years. A 2017 investigation by television news program 60 Minutes and the Washington Post outlined this practice and helped expose how Congress allowed it—and even encouraged it. As laid out by whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi, the former head of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, a 2016 law called the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, signed by President Barack Obama, made it harder for the DEA to freeze suspicious opioid shipments by these drug distributors. The law had been sponsored by Pennsylvania representative Tom Marino, who, at the time of the investigation’s publication, was President Trump’s nominee for drug czar. He was forced to withdraw. cool18.com
cool18.comDid Obama realize the law—which Congress quickly green-lighted, without debate—would have such devastating consequences? No, concluded an October 2017 Washington Post story: “Few lawmakers knew the true impact the law would have,” it reads, adding that the White House was also unaware. Nonetheless, according to a 2019 Washington Post analysis, the Obama administration did not take sufficient measures to stem the fentanyl crisis as it developed. cool18.com
cool18.comPharmaceutical companies making opioids, among them Purdue, as well as others along the supply chain, including distributors, find themselves facing major lawsuits from states, cities, and other groups, supported by the US Justice Department. The groups seek something similar to the big tobacco settlement of 1998, which required cigarette companies to pay billions annually to the states, and limited the industry’s marketing, to compensate for the heavy costs of dealing with the health effects of smoking. cool18.com
cool18.comThe state of Florida has also included the country’s biggest chain pharmacies—Walgreens and CVS—in its lawsuit, because of their roles in selling opioids, and Oklahoma is targeting Johnson &. Johnson for its role in the crisis, including selling fentanyl through its Janssen subsidiary. cool18.com
cool18.comBy the mid-2010s prescription pill deaths in the United States began leveling off, but “for every life we save from a prescription overdose,” said Joel Bomgar, vice chairman of the House Medicaid Committee in the Mississippi House of Representatives, “four more are dying from switching to heroin and fentanyl.” cool18.com
cool18.comFentanyl is frequently cut into heroin but, increasingly, fentanyl is also being pressed into pills that look exactly like name-brand prescription tablets. Raids across the United States have turned up operations in houses and apartments that turn fentanyl powder into tablets using specialized presses. Both the drugs and the machines are bought from China. These operations can make thousands of pills per hour. They stamp the pills with the OxyContin or Percocet logo, making them indistinguishable. This trend has quickly gained steam. In Arizona alone, the DEA reported seizing more than 120,000 fentanyl pills in 2017. And in May 2018, three twenty-one-year-old brothers from Raleigh, North Carolina—identical triplets named Atsouste, Etse, and Atsou Dossou—were arrested, accused of running a vast drug operation, which included making and selling thousands of fake Xanax bars cut with fentanyl. “The issue of counterfeit drugs is more complex and extensive than what can be seen on the surface,” retired Phoenix detective sergeant David Lake said at a roundtable discussion on the opioid crisis held in August 2018. “The constant threat from online sales, illegal pharmacies and street sales is stretching the limited law enforcement resources dedicated to this issue in many states and communities to the breaking point.” cool18.com
cool18.comThe dosages of these fake pills vary greatly. One might have ten times as much fentanyl as the next. Investigators believe such counterfeit pills were responsible for the death of music star Prince; about one hundred white pills found on his property looked exactly like Vicodin but actually contained fentanyl. It’s not clear how he obtained them; he may not have realized he was taking counterfeit medication. (Michael Todd Schulenberg, a Minnesota doctor who investigators believe prescribed opioids for Prince under another person’s name, paid $30,000 to settle a Controlled Substances Act violation and is being sued by relatives of Prince, but he is not being charged criminally in the musician’s death.) cool18.com
cool18.comCocaine can also be spiked with fentanyl. American cocaine overdose deaths remained fairly steady throughout the first decade of the 2000s—ranging from roughly four thousand to seven thousand—but in the second decade began to surge, exceeding fourteen thousand in 2017. Fentanyl is part of the reason for this. Cocaine production is at an all-time high, and the product is flooding the market, but it’s far from pure. Because they are both white powders, cocaine and fentanyl can be mixed easily, and fentanyl sometimes “contaminates” cocaine parcels, where the drugs are prepared in the same space. Fentanyl was involved in two of five cocaine overdose deaths in 2016, the most recent year for which such statistics are available. This trend disproportionately affects African Americans, who are nearly twice as likely to die from cocaine overdoses as white people. cool18.com
cool18.comIn New York City in 2016, more than one-third of all fatal drug overdose victims had both fentanyl and cocaine in their systems. By the end of 2017, in Massachusetts, cocaine used in conjunction with fentanyl was killing more people than heroin spiked with fentanyl, and in Ohio, cocaine was often mixed with carfentanil, a tranquilizer used to subdue rhinos and elephants (sometimes shot from dart guns) that can be one hundred times more potent than fentanyl. In July 2018 the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield Jr., revealed that his thirty-seven-year-old son had nearly died from cocaine laced with fentanyl. Two months later, the popular rapper Mac Miller died in his Studio City, California, home—with fentanyl and cocaine in his system, and in December, 2018, Vine and HQ Trivia cofounder Colin Kroll was found dead with heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, and an analogue called fluoroisobutyryl fentanyl in his system. Fentanyl’s rapid growth in the drug economy is putting users, from recreational to deeply addicted, at risk of grave consequences. cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com* Opiates generally refers to drugs derived naturally from the opium poppy, like morphine, while opioids generally means similar chemicals made synthetically in labs, like fentanyl. cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comTwo cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comHumanity has long mined psychoactive chemicals from the natural world to worship gods, to feel bliss, to commune with the dead, to heal, to avoid problems, to escape ennui, to make art, or to just go on a little adventure of the mind. At first, people ingested these chemicals directly from living things, eating mushrooms, cactus buttons, and morning glory seeds; chewing coca and khat leaves; inhaling tree snuff; smoking cannabis, opium, or even the venom of toads; fermenting grapes and barley; curing tobacco; steeping leaves; and roasting beans. cool18.com
cool18.comHistorically, only a few handfuls of different compounds have been used reliably to get people high, but over the past hundred years or so, humankind has learned to synthesize the active chemicals in laboratories and to manipulate chemical structures to invent new drugs—the numbers of which began growing exponentially in the 2010s. Anyone with computer acumen can acquire hundreds of psychoactive compounds that didn’t exist even a few years ago. cool18.com
cool18.comAccording to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 150 new illicit drugs were bought and sold between 1997 and 2010. Another 150 appeared in just the next three years, and since then, in some years as many as 100 new chemicals have appeared, with synthetic cannabinoids especially common. cool18.com
cool18.comThough they can be incredibly potent and affect the body in new ways, these latest drugs aren’t conceived out of thin air. In fact, many are derived from the same naturally occurring chemicals our ancestors have been using for thousands of years. Fentanyl, for example, is a new plague, but its natural predecessor, the opium poppy, has been used (and abused) since at least the Mesopotamian era. cool18.com
cool18.comThe story of fentanyl, however, can be traced to one man: Paul Janssen. cool18.com
cool18.comA Belgian chemist, Janssen was undoubtedly a genius. He could quote Homer in the Ancient Greek. During World War II he studied chemistry and other sciences at university in Namur, Belgium—enrolling secretly, despite the Nazi occupation—and in 1948, when he was twenty-two, he funded a trip to America in part by beating opponents in chess, at venues including the Manhattan Chess Club. What Janssen was best known for was creating medicines. Over his lifetime, he was responsible for some eighty new medical drugs, including fentanyl. One biographer called him “the most prolific drug inventor of all time.” His brilliance wasn’t just in coming up with new medicines but in realizing that new medicines could be created in the first place. cool18.com
cool18.comJanssen was born in 1926 in the small Belgian town of Turnhout. When she was four, Janssen’s younger sister died of tubercular meningitis, a then untreatable condition that can now be controlled with antibiotics. Janssen was in high school at the time, and his sorrow over his sister’s death inspired his journey into medicine. He was mentored by his father, a family doctor in Turnhout, who would operate on patients in their own homes. In these first decades of the twentieth century, rather than give patients the available medicines—organ extracts and tonics that are nowadays discredited—Janssen’s father gave them placebos. “And he was absolutely right to do so,” Paul Janssen later wrote. “Naturally, there was insulin, cardiac glycosides, aspirin and morphine, but where most of the other medicines were concerned, one could safely say they did more harm than good.” Janssen’s father nonetheless started his own medicine company. After the discovery of penicillin, his company sold the antibiotic and also produced its own products, which mainly were combinations of existing drugs. The enterprise’s success did little to impress the younger Janssen, at the time a precocious chemistry and medical student. cool18.com
cool18.com“Come up with something better yourself, then,” his father challenged him. cool18.com
cool18.comAt age twenty-six, Janssen began pursuing new chemicals, with some help from his father, who fronted him money and lab space. cool18.com
cool18.comBut Janssen wasn’t interested in slapping new labels on old chemicals. He wanted to create new drugs that actually made people feel better—and that he could patent. The key to this, he learned, was playing around with chemical structures. Based on the work of Nobel Prize–winning German medical scientist Paul Ehrlich, Janssen knew that adjusting the chemical makeup of a known drug, even just slightly, could create something that could affect the human body in dramatically new ways. cool18.com
cool18.comA year later, in 1953, Paul Janssen founded his company, Janssen Pharmaceutica, initially working out of the third floor of his father’s building. “We didn’t even have a calculator, let alone a computer for the simplest calculations,” Janssen wrote in 2000. “To reduce expenditure we economized by performing simple tests on pieces of gut from newly slaughtered rabbits, which I collected early in the morning from a butcher in Turnhout.” cool18.com
cool18.comDespite its modest beginnings, the company hit the ground running with its discovery of a drug called ambucetamide, used to alleviate menstrual pain. Janssen would also invent loperamide (Imodium), for diarrhea, as well as chemicals that became critical to the fields of psychiatry, mycology, and parasitology. To spur his company’s ascent, he recruited star Belgian scientists from the Belgian Congo, after the political upheaval there that would lead to the country’s independence and the end of colonial rule. He was soon managing a large staff—its members called him Dr. Paul—but still closely involved with creating new chemicals. He literally daydreamed about molecules. “I often watched him at meetings,” wrote Sir James Black, a physiology and medicine Nobel laureate of King’s College London, “when bored with the proceedings, finding solace inside his head as he doodled new chemical compounds!” cool18.com
cool18.comOne of these new chemicals was fentanyl, which Janssen and his team first synthesized in 1959 by experimenting with the chemical structure of morphine. cool18.com
cool18.comDerived naturally from the resin of the opium poppy, morphine was chemically isolated at the dawn of the nineteenth century by German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner, whonamed it for Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. By Janssen’s time it was the reigning pain reliever. Janssen began subtly altering parts of its chemical structure to create new compounds. He tested the effectiveness of these creations, including fentanyl, on lab mice, placing the mice on hot plates and slowly turning up the heat to gauge their reactions. cool18.com
cool18.comHe developed many morphine derivatives, but fentanyl was particularly profitable for Janssen Pharmaceutica. Doctors found it superior to morphine because of the way it acted. Like morphine, it bound with a receptor in the brain (which we now call the “mu” receptor) to cause pain relief. But fentanyl came on faster, was much more powerful, and wasn’t as likely to cause nausea. “Fentanyl,” Janssen later wrote, “made it possible for the first time to perform lengthy operations and, together with its successors, heralded a revolution in the operating theatre. Without this compound and its analogue, sufentanil, open-heart surgery [as performed today] would not be possible.” cool18.com
cool18.comThe drug was a revelation, and it went on to become the world’s most widely used anesthetic. Janssen Pharmaceutica was purchased by American behemoth Johnson &. Johnson in 1961, and Paul Janssen continued working for the company, tasked with developing other types of fentanyl, referred to as analogues. But almost from the start, fentanyl’s potential addictive dangers were recognized, and it was placed under international control by a United Nations agreement in 1964. This led countries including the United States and the United Kingdom, in 1971, to schedule it—that is, to ban its recreational use. Indeed, its euphoric qualities would prove too much for many users to resist. “Fentanyl is a good medicine but a bad drug,” Justice Tettey, chief of the Laboratory and Scientific Section at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, summed up later. “It has excellent pain relieving properties, but is liable to abuse and can rapidly lead to dependency.” cool18.com
cool18.comDespite fentanyl’s quick success as a painkiller in Europe, during the 1960s it was almost blocked for sale in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration. One vocal opponent to the drug’s approval was University of Pennsylvania anesthesiology professor Robert Dripps. A rare outlier who believed fentanyl’s high potency could lead to abuse, he eventually agreed to a compromise after being lobbied by Paul Janssen himself: fentanyl would be available, but only when diluted with another drug called droperidol, a sedative—also patented by Janssen—that was believed to mitigate fentanyl’s detrimental effects. A ratio of fifty parts droperidol to one part fentanyl produced a “bad high” when taken recreationally, Dripps and Janssen agreed, and thus was unlikely to be abused. The FDA approved this combination in 1968. Fentanyl’s success boosted Janssen’s bottom line, which drove Paul Janssen and his colleagues to develop many other fentanyl analogues. Some, like alpha-methylfentanyl, were never turned into medicines that were sold. Others, however, made it to market, including sufentanil, used in long-lasting surgeries, and carfentanil, a veterinary medicine that is the strongest fentanyl analogue ever made commercially. cool18.com
cool18.comAt the very end of the 1970s, a pair of overdose deaths in Orange County, California, stumped authorities. A few bits of information were known about the victims. They seemed likely to have both used heroin, as shown by the telltale scarring (tracks) on their bodies and the heroin paraphernalia discovered with their bodies. But toxicology reports bizarrely didn’t turn up any known drugs in their system. Soon, a half dozen more people in the county had died under similar circumstances, and then twice as many. cool18.com
cool18.comAround the same time, police began discovering a new drug on the street, China White. Traditionally, dealers of China White touted their product as the finest heroin available—pale in color and originating in East or Southeast Asia. “To get connected with China White is a sort of fantasy for [opiate] addicts,” Darryl Inaba, director of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic of San Francisco, said in a report in US Navy Medicine. This new China White had no heroin in it, however, and rather than a fantasy it was a nightmare. Instead of pure heroin from Asia, laboratory analysis determined that it contained something called alpha-methylfentanyl—a fentanyl analogue. cool18.com
cool18.comThough this particular chemical had been synthesized by Janssen Pharmaceutica, it was never developed into a medical product. The source of the China White remained a mystery. Presumably, the recipe had been stolen from scientific literature published by Janssen scientists, and then the drug had been cooked up by rogue chemists. But no China White lab was ever seized, and no one was arrested. There were plenty of guesses, however, including some wild speculation from a famed psychedelic chemist and drug expert named Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin. “Had China been developing some super-potent fentanyl analogues as potential warfare agents? Let the fantasy roll,” he wrote in 1997. “Maybe the Chinese were using second class citizens (the drug-using population of California) as guinea pigs for the initial human trials of their new drugs.” Also suspected were scientists in Russia, which had developed fentanyl problems of its own. cool18.com
cool18.comChina White represented a fish-crawling-onto-land moment: it was the first popular, illicit drug synthesized by a rogue chemist that was new, rather than simply a copy of something already on the medical market. And thus, alpha-methylfentanyl was the first in a long line of new psychoactive substances that came to include K2, Spice, “bath salts,” and all the other substances this book is about. Back before they were called novel psychoactive substances, or NPS, they were known by another name: designer drugs. cool18.com
cool18.comCalling alpha-methylfentanyl China White was smart marketing, as it evoked a desirable type of heroin. What truly helped the product stand apart, however, was the fact that it was legal. Fentanyl itself had been illegal for recreational use since 1971, as a schedule II drug with a high potential for abuse.* And chemically alpha-methylfentanyl was almost identical. But the key word is almost. It wasn’t identical. It had a unique molecular design. And therefore the police were powerless. “You could walk around with a shopping bag full of it and nobody could do anything to you,” observed Robert J. Roberton, chief of the state of California’s Division of Drug Programs. cool18.com
cool18.comOther fentanyl variations followed on alpha-methylfentanyl’s heels. In the early 1980s, more troubling reports about users injecting drugs that weren’t quite heroin emerged from California. In 1982 a man named George Carillo was brought to a San José hospital practically immobile, and his girlfriend, Juanita Lopez, came in a week later, also suffering from stiffness, paralysis, and other symptoms similar to Parkinson’s, except Carillo and Lopez were too young to have the disease. A handful of other victims with similar symptoms were soon identified. Eventually their condition was traced back to a new opioid they had injected called MPPP, which was intended to imitate heroin but had been synthesized incorrectly, inadvertently creating a different substance, MPTP, with disastrous side effects. This story at least has a silver lining, as research on the victims catalyzed new discoveries leading to advancement in Parkinson’s research. cool18.com
cool18.comSoon afterward, the US government began regulating drugs that didn’t yet exist. The DEA needed six months to schedule a new drug, and by that time new analogues were already popular on the streets. So in 1984 Congress granted the DEA emergency scheduling powers, so the agency could ban drugs immediately. But even this was insufficient to stop the new fentanyl analogues, which sometimes started killing people before the DEA had even heard of them. cool18.com
cool18.comThus was inspired the Federal Analogue Act, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. The legislation specifically went after fentanyls and what would become known as designer drugs and NPS. It made anything deemed “substantially similar” to schedule I or II psychoactive drugs—in either effect or structure—automatically illegal the moment it came into being. cool18.com
cool18.comHowever, banning something “substantially similar” proved challenging. Just because chemicals have similar structures doesn’t mean they will affect the human body the same way; in fact, quite often the effects can be dramatically different. Further, the law aimed at psychoactive substances, but what constitutes psychoactive can be debated. A strong cup of coffee can have a powerful impact, as can large amounts of chocolate and sugar.* cool18.com
cool18.comThe US Federal Analogue Act is still used to prosecute makers of analogue drugs, though these prosecutions can be difficult because the government must prove the defendant knew the substance was similar to a controlled chemical. Furthermore, little evidence exists that the Federal Analogue Act has had a strong deterrent effect. In fact, since its enactment the number of new analogue drugs being consumed by Americans has skyrocketed. Most NPS are made in China, and since China lacks an analogue act of its own, generally, drugs there must be banned one at a time, as they are discovered. (There are three United Nations international drug treaties—from 1961, 1971, and 1988, to which China, Russia, the United States, and most other world powers are signatories—and they also operate the same way, without an analogue act.) Thus, brand-new drugs that are automatically covered by US laws start off perfectly legal for manufacture and export in China, although the county recently announced a ban of all fentanyl analogues. cool18.com
cool18.comThe United States seems just as susceptible tonew drugs as countries like Sweden, which lacks an analogue act. While Sweden has been devastated by dangerous analogues such as cyclopropylfentanyl, acrylfentanyl, and acetylfentanyl, the United States has been hit particularly hard by carfentanil, the veterinary tranquilizer that can be one hundred times more potent than fentanyl and five thousand times more potent than heroin. Carfentanil was responsible for killing more than eleven hundred Ohio residents between July 2016 and June 2017 alone. cool18.com
cool18.comAt this point in the cat-and-mouse game between legislators and rogue chemists, warns Julijan “Sidney” Picej (an expert on new drugs who is from Ljubljana, Slovenia), the rogue chemists are so desperate for new products that they’ll try anything. “Good combinations are long gone. Their approach to finding a new flagship product is, ‘Anything goes, as long as it’s not fatal if you use it the first three times,’” he said. “It’s difficult for users and researchers to get any info, since the molecule was literally synthesized for the first time three weeks ago.” cool18.com
cool18.comIn the mid-1980s, it wasn’t clear whether these types of “synthetic heroin” would become a plague or simply fade away. A University of California at Davis pharmacology professor named Gary Henderson studied the chemical impurities in China White and concluded that a single chemist was responsible for all of it. “Most likely he made a few grams of the drug—millions of doses—and then shut up his shop,” he told journalist Jack Shafer in 1985. cool18.com
cool18.comHenderson became the scientist doctors turned to when their overdose patients had strange blood samples, and the DEA consulted when it turned up inscrutable chemicals. He had already been researching fentanyl for years; his lab focused on how it was used to dope racehorses, whose urine turned up traces of it. He worked to develop a technique to identify fentanyl and began to understand the nature of the drug, including its potential for chemical manipulation. “Perhaps hundreds,” he said, when asked how many fentanyl analogues would be possible. “Maybe thousands.” cool18.com
cool18.comHenderson was way ahead of his time when it came to predicting the horrors not just of fentanyl but of NPS generally. “It seems we are still watching reruns of The French Connection while there is someone out there using a computer to search the chemical literature looking for new drugs to synthesize,” he told the US Senate’s Budget Committee in July 1985, a statement that was remarkably prescient. He coined the phrase designer drugs, defining them as “substances where the psychoactive properties of a drug are retained, but the molecular structure has been altered to avoid prosecution.” Often synthesized from common chemicals, they were skillfully marketed under attractive, exotic names, he added. His 1988 paper “Designer Drugs: Past History and Future Prospects” is nothing less than prophecy, speculating accurately not just on the future of NPS chemistry but on the implications for law enforcement. “In the view of this author,” he wrote, “it is likely that the future drugs of abuse will be synthetics rather than plant products. A single gram of any very potent drug could be synthesized at one location, transported to distribution sites worldwide, and then formulated (cut) into many thousand, perhaps a million, doses…. Preventing the distribution of such small amounts of the pure drug will be exceedingly difficult…. In fact, any success we may have in curtailing the distribution of natural products such as opium, coca, and marijuana and preventing the diversion of pharmaceuticals will only stimulate the development of potent synthetic substitutes.” cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com* Schedule I drugs have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” while Schedule II drugs have “a high potential for abuse, with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence,” according to the DEA. cool18.com
cool18.com* The United Kingdom went even further with an analogue act thirty years later, in 2016, when it enacted the Psychoactive Substances Act, which sought to ban anything that could get a person high, with medicine, alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine specifically exempted. The purpose of the bill was to combat “legal highs,” such as synthetic cannabinoids and ecstasy knockoffs, which had been sold lawfully in head shops—but the bill had unseen ramifications. The Church of England and the Catholic Church were worried that using incense in services could lead to prosecution, and the bill’s implementation was delayed over concerns that the difficulty of defining psychoactive might make the law problematic to enforce. Ultimately it was implemented and did successfully remove “legal highs” from store shelves, but the long-term ramifications aren’t yet fully understood. cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comThree cool18.com
cool18.com
cool18.comThe 1989 police action comedy Tango &. Cash, starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as narcotics detectives with outsize opinions of themselves, may not have gotten great reviews, but it did inspire the name of a new fentanyl product, which began killing people in the northeastern United States in early 1991. The deceased included residents of New York City, Newark and Paterson in New Jersey, and Hartford, Connecticut. Almost all of the drug called Tango and Cash seemed to originate from an open-air drug market in the Bronx, near 138th Street and Brook Avenue, described in the Hartford Courant as, “a kind of regional wholesaler to dealers from cities around the Northeast.” Over the weekend beginning February 2, 1991, Tango and Cash caused a dozen deaths and more than one hundred overdoses. cool18.com
cool18.comThe New York Times quoted a thirty-nine-year-old heroin user named Richie, who was pursuing the drug despite its toxic effects. “When an addict hears that someone O.D.’d, the first question they ask is: ‘Where’d they get it?’ Because they want to find some of it for themselves.” cool18.com
cool18.comThe deaths continued. During 1991 and 1992, 126 people in the Northeast died from this new fentanyl product, which was also sometimes called China White. More than twenty of the deceased came from Philadelphia. “Some of the Philadelphia junkies died so swiftly that syringes were still embedded in their arms,” reported the Baltimore Sun. Alpha-methylfentanyl, even though it had been scheduled in 1981, was discovered in some of the Tango and Cash batches. (News reports from this era weren’t always clear about whether the drugs involved were fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue like alpha-methylfentanyl, so the term fentanyl is used below to reference both.) cool18.com
cool18.comFor almost two years, police remained stymied in their search for the drug’s source. But then in December 1992, they received a valuable clue from a Boston drug dealer named Christopher Moscatiello. In the midst of a fentanyl sale, he mentioned to a customer that his Wichita, Kansas, supplier had nearly died from a fentanyl overdose. Moscatiello didn’t realize it at the time, but the customer was actually a DEA agent. cool18.com
cool18.comDEA began pursuing the tip, despite the fact that Kansas seemed an odd place for a fentanyl laboratory, since the Midwest wasn’t yet associated with deaths from the substance. But it turned out the supplier in question had Eastern ties. He was a Pittsburgh businessman named Joseph Martier. In August 1992 paramedics responding to a 911 call found Martier passed out in a storage building near Wichita, having overdosed on fentanyl. In February, 1993, the DEA arrested Martier and raided his facility, alleging that his was the country’s only lab making fentanyl. This drug, the agency noted, was “the serial killer of the drug world.” cool18.com
cool18.comAlso taken into custody was Martier’s partner, a drug cook named George Marquardt. No ordinary illicit chemist, Marquardt was an oddly philosophical, hyperintelligent chemistry prodigy. A retired DEA agent later called him “the very best illicit chemist in the history of American drugmaking.” cool18.com
cool18.comAs a child Marquardt had been fascinated by “an anti-drug film in which a mouse on LSD chased a cat.” Before he was old enough to drive, he was making heroin with a friend, and after doing research for the University of Wisconsin (from which he pilfered lab equipment) he pretended to be a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, falsely adding the claim to his CV in an attempt to trick a Milwaukee college into accepting him as a physics lecturer. The ruse succeeded. cool18.com
cool18.comMarquardt single-handedly fashioned his own mass spectrometer, a complicated scientific instrument used to identify chemicals, and became a drug mercenary for hire, eschewing the academic world because it didn’t pay enough. But he was genuinely fascinated with the magic of chemistry and had a selfless streak as well. At one point, he said, he synthesized clandestine AZT for people with AIDS. Marquardt made his name, however, with hard drugs, venturing further and further into a dangerous underworld, emboldened by a belief—similar to one held by Walter White of the series Breaking Bad—that drug kingpins wouldn’t kill him because he made a superior product. He first learned about fentanyl in 1978, while doing jail time after being busted at his Oklahoma meth lab. Upon his release he began producing it, but not before doing his homework. “I read the forensic science literature religiously,” he said. “I read publications like Police Science Abstracts. Surveyed all the appearances of fentanyl everywhere that I could find out from the literature. And gave careful thought to what these people had done wrong.” He reported spending more than a week at a time cooking up batches, and he sought to make different varieties of fentanyl so his products would appear to come from different labs and thus confuse the authorities. cool18.com
cool18.comThe DEA, however, believed it could trace the 126 Northeastern deaths back to Marquardt and Martier’s lab, and Marquardt was charged with distributing and manufacturing fentanyl. He immediately confessed to his crimes. “I just don’t bother with the lies,” he said. “When the game’s over, it’s just over. If you can’t deal with the consequences of these things, you should have carried a lunch bucket.” In the end, Marquardt’s products were thought to have killed more people than initially suspected—perhaps two hundred or even three hundred. He served twenty-two years in prison and was released in 2015. cool18.com
cool18.comMarquardt now swears he is done with fentanyl, but he has little remorse. “I don’t feel like I’m supplying a product to an innocent or naïve population,” he said. “I attach no blame to them. They are what they are. I am what I am. We’re both criminals.” cool18.com
cool18.comThe moral discussion of accountability becomes more complicated when one considers legitimate university scientists who, like Marquardt, were also making fentanyls. They sought to patent new chemicals that would benefit the study of medicine and, ultimately, people suffering from pain. For this reason, most people would give them the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that they were often motivated by financial gain as well—and that such scientists sometimes unwittingly paved the way for rogue chemists to exploit their work. cool18.com
cool18.comA fentanyl analogue called 3-methylfentanyl, patented by a University of Mississippi professor of medicinal chemistry named Thomas Riley, provides a case in point. Riley developed it from Paul Janssen’s original fentanyl, and hoped that 3-methylfentanyl might perhaps maintain fentanyl’s potent analgesic (or pain-reducing) qualities, without sharing its dangerous attributes, and catch on as a medical product. In 1973, he and two other collaborators published a paper about their studies of 3-methylfentanyl on rats, but the results were not what Riley hoped. It was never commercially marketed, and he never made any money off it. cool18.com
cool18.comWith addicted users, however, 3-methylfentanyl was a huge hit. In the late 1980s it killed eighteen people in western Pennsylvania. Predating Tango and Cash, this was the first major case of fentanyl-related deaths since the California overdoses earlier in the decade. cool18.com
cool18.comMore than a decade later, 3-methylfentanyl was at the center of an armed hostage crisis in Moscow. On October 23, 2002, a huge crowd had gathered in a converted ball-bearing factory for the performance of Nord-Ost (Northeast), a musical celebrating Russian heritage that was the most expensive production of its kind in the country’s history. The show came to an abrupt halt when dozens of Chechen rebels seized control of the facility, taking about eight hundred attendees hostage and threatening to kill them if the Chechen war with Russia wasn’t immediately ended. The standoff lasted for several days, and on October 26 Russian security police pumped a gray aerosol gas into the building, intending to knock out the hijackers before forcing their way in. The guerillas were killed, but so were about 120 of the hostages, who were already weakened by days without food or water. Some died en route to the hospital. cool18.com
cool18.comThough authorities initially declined to say what chemical agent had been used, the Russian health minister and a Russian newspaper later identified it as 3-methylfentanyl. Subsequent analysis of survivors’ clothing indicates it was possibly a chemical cocktail containing numerous drugs, including carfentanil. cool18.com
cool18.comRussia claimed that the gas used was nonlethal and intended to simply put both the rebels and the civilians to sleep. Though some praised the Russian effort for saving the majority of the hostages, many international observers criticized it as a type of chemical warfare that not only violated international treaties but also was based on foolhardy science. cool18.com
cool18.com“There is no way known to medical science that can put a large number of people to sleep without killing a sizable percentage of them,” said Harvard biology professor Matt Meselson. “In medicine you are dealing with one patient. You can see when he is asleep and, assuming your hand isn’t shaking too badly on the valve, you probably won’t kill him. But the military objective is different. You have to put 100 percent of the people to sleep—not 50 percent, not 70 percent—and you have to put them to sleep fast. There isn’t any way to do that effectively and safely.” Analysts continue to worry that fentanyls could be used in large-scale attacks, particularly by terrorists, considering that a tiny amount can do such damage. In January, 2019, Massachusetts senator Ed Markey wrote letters to the State and Defense Departments, warning of the possibility of such an attack on Americans. “To my knowledge, no such strategy exists at present for addressing the threat fentanyl poses,” he wrote. cool18.com
cool18.comIn 1988, an international treaty scheduled 3-methylfentanyl—effectively outlawing it in much of the world—but by the early 2000s it had begun catching on as a street drug in Eastern European countries such as Estonia. The small former Soviet satellite, known for its brisk economic growth, already had a large heroin problem, but the heroin supply from Afghanistan was squeezed after the Taliban banned opium poppy farming in 2000. Fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl began to take off, likely entering the country from Russia, which it borders. Over the next decade a thousand or more Estonians died from fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl overdose, a startling number for a country of only 1.3 million. cool18.com
cool18.comThough the heroin supply has reemerged, the destruction from fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl continues in Estonia. “The dealers realize it’s easier to traffic and package fentanyl than heroin … and so they strictly control the market in favor of fentanyl. Even though drug users themselves say they would prefer heroin, it’s simply not allowed [by dealers] in Estonian markets,” observed Aljona Kurbatova, head of the Infectious Diseases and Drug Abuse Prevention Department at Estonia’s National Institute for Health Development. cool18.com
cool18.comA 2016 study showed Estonia to have the highest increase in drug-overdose deaths in the world, and the entrenchment of fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl there serves as a portentous warning for number two: the United States. Despite hopes that the crisis has peaked, experts believe fentanyl and its analogues could be just picking up speed. Fentanyl is also threatening to become an epidemic in other countries. Australia has already seen five hundred fentanyl deaths from 2010 through 2015 (the most recent year for which figures were available), and the number is believed to be surging. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that the most common method of illicit fentanyl use in Australia seems to be extracting the drug from pharmaceutical products such as transdermal patches and that this is also the case in Germany. While Europe’s problem with fentanyl is smaller than North America’s, a sharp uptick in deaths indicates the crisis may also be spreading to the United Kingdom, which according to one survey buys more fentanyl from the Dark Web than any other European country. cool18.com
cool18.comEven aside from fentanyl, fentanyl analogues have triggered a crisis in some countries. In 2016, Sweden suffered forty-three deaths associated with acrylfentanyl, an analogue discussed in scientific literature during the 1980s but unknown in Sweden until it started killing people. In 2017 another analogue, cyclopropylfentanyl, caused more than seventy deaths there. Now, because of the fentanyl analogues, fentanyls as a class have displaced heroin as the number-one killer drug in the country. The analogues there are purchased almost entirely over the Internet, from China. cool18.com
cool18.comOther European and Eastern European countries are also starting to see fentanyls from China, but that’s a fairly recent development. Until recent years, European fentanyl was procured locally—stolen from pharmacies, for example, or harvested from patches in hospital waste—or received from Russia and its Eastern bloc neighbors. cool18.com
cool18.comRussia itself imports vast quantities of ecstasy and synthetic cannabinoids from China, and the country has widespread public-health problems with drugs including heroin and “bath salts.” Russia also harbors a huge psychonaut community, whose members create new drugs and discuss them on Internet message boards. It’s difficult to gauge whether Russia suffers from widespread fentanyl addiction, because its data reporting is very poor. The country has undoubtedly been producing the synthetic drug for a long time, however, both legally and illegally. Before the dissolution of the USSR, it was producing fentanyl for its army. “It was included as a painkiller in the emergency kits for Soviet Union soldiers,” said Roumen Sedefov of the European Monitoring Centre For Drugs and Drug Addiction. “After the Soviet Union collapse, we think there may have been huge stockpiles of fentanyl, in Lithuania and other countries, and a lot of it was diverted into Europe and sold on the illicit market. This may have fueled, partly, the epidemic here in Europe.” William Leonard Pickard, a famed LSD chemist now serving a life sentence for conspiring to manufacture and distribute LSD, studied the Russian fentanyl epidemic in the 1990s while a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He uncovered Mafia-run laboratories in Azerbaijan, where chemists who were winners of the Russian chemistry olympiad synthesized fentanyls including 3-methylfentanyl. They were imprisoned, but he feared that other out-of-work chemists formerly employed by the Soviet Union could spread fentanyl far beyond the country’s borders. cool18.com
cool18.comIn 2018, a former colonel in the Russian army named Sergei Skripal was poisoned in Salisbury, England, along with his daughter. The poison was reportedly fentanyl. Skripal had been convicted in Russia of spying for Britain years earlier but was sent to the United Kingdom as part of a “spy swap,” an exchange for sleeper agents in the United States. Both he and his daughter survived. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov denied Russian involvement. cool18.com
cool18.comThe fentanyl analogue 3-methylfentanyl has never been used as a medical drug. There is no legitimate need for anyone to have it, with the exception of official forensic labs in places like Estonia, where tiny quantities are needed to verify the types of street fentanyl that are killing people. Still, numerous Chinese labs make it for illicit use. cool18.com
cool18.comThough 3-methylfentanyl has likely killed thousands of people, its inventor, Thomas Riley, who died in 2005, appears to have been unaware of the fallout. His widow, Phyllis Riley, doesn’t believe he knew the drug was used illicitly. One of his former colleagues, retired University of Mississippi pharmacology professor Marvin Wilson, was Riley’s coauthor, along with Danny B. Hale, of a 1973 paper about 3-methylfentanyl published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Science. Wilson acknowledged that drug peddlers could have learned about 3-methylfentanyl from their paper. “Chemists of the [DEA] believe that any competent chemist could make the substance after reading Dr. Riley’s description in the chemical literature,” read a 1980 New York Times article on the subject. Wilson recalled they weren’t much concerned with its abuse potential. “Because it was so potent, a lot of us at the time thought that it probably won’t get into the abuse channels, because it would be so potentially dangerous, and small changes in the dose could have dramatic effects on the body. We weren’t thinking of it as a new heroin.” cool18.com
cool18.comThe conflict between legitimate medical science and illicit drug chemistry has come to the forefront as NPS have spread. Not just fentanyls, but deadly hallucinogens, synthetic cannabinoids, fake ecstasy, and other stimulants have all gotten their starts in scientific labs. Academics say nothing can stop legitimate scientific creations from crossing over into the realm of abuse—without stifling science. Nonetheless, the trend has caused some outraged family members of overdose victims to demand that the university-sanctioned creators of these drugs be held accountable. cool18.com
cool18.com“We as scientists just haven’t been able to differentiate the receptors that lead to abuse from those that are associated with the analgesic,” Wilson laments. “And that’s a conundrum. Scientists come up with knowledge, and people choose to use that knowledge in different ways. Some beneficial, and some not so beneficial. But tonot continue the scientific endeavor, certainly is not a good option for mankind either.” cool18.com
cool18.comMarvin Wilson and his colleagues were not alone in underestimating the potential popularity of fentanyl. Experts ranging from health-care professionals to top scientists knew how powerful and addictive fentanyl was, and yet very few of them expected it to seize hold in the general population. The underestimation of fentanyl’s potential extended to the DEA, even as recently as 2015. That year the agency’s National Drug Threat Assessment Summary, which focuses on drug abuse trends, read: “Fentanyl will remain a threat while the current clandestine production continues; however, it is unlikely to assume a significant portion of the opioid market. Fentanyl’s short-lasting high, coupled with its high mortality rate, renders it unappealing to many opioid users who prefer the longer-lasting high that heroin offers and who wish to avoid the increased danger from fentanyl.” cool18.com
cool18.comOne year later, fentanyl had shot past heroin and was killing more Americans annually than any other drug in American history. And the fentanyl analogues, which are being developed and marketed at an increasingly rapid clip, threaten to make the problem worse.
请点这里投票，“赞”助支持！