Yana Hotter
Journalist Ben Westhoff didn’t set out to spend four years researching and writing a 350-page exposé on the booming synthetic drug industry; he just wanted to know why so many people were dying at raves. His research brought him to novel psychoactive substances, or NPSs, lab-created versions of traditional drugs that are easier to transport and far more potent than the traditional drugs they’re designed to mimic. The most famous NPS is fentanyl, which has passed heroin as the deadliest drug in St. Louis and much of the nation. In his new book, Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic, Westhoff examines the crisis, incorporating insights from chemists, dark web dealers, addicts, and those who’ve lost loved ones to the drugs. On September 4, Westhoff visits St. Louis County Library to discuss the new book.
What do you hope readers take away? People are always going to use drugs. We can either bury our heads in the sand or we can live with this reality and try to make it as safe as possible. There are a lot of great organizations working on harm reduction, but they’re hindered by U.S. laws. Drug checking is one of the most important things that the government can encourage; if people realize fentanyl is in the drug they’re using, they’re less likely to use it… Also, at supervised injection facilities like in Europe, users can get clean needles, and there’s a doctor or nurse standing by if something goes wrong… And the legacy of the War on Drugs: No one would have ever heard of these NPSs if not for the policies to suppress previous generations of drugs. If marijuana had always been legal and people weren’t trying to pass a drug test, synthetic cannabinoids wouldn’t even be around.
China has pledged to crack down, but my findings were that it’s actually encouraging this industry through the tax code, giving financial incentives to export these drugs to places like the U.S. The U.S. should pressure China to stop doing that and let regulatory agencies do their job. They’re underfunded, understaffed, and there are so many layers of bureaucracy that one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. The other issue is scheduling all these fentanyl precursors. Mexican cartels are heavily in the fentanyl game, but they don’t have the skilled chemists to make fentanyl from scratch, so they get all the precursors from China. A lot of them aren’t scheduled, even in the U.S.
Your book goes well beyond the stats. This is an epidemic like America has never seen. It’s easy to rattle off the numbers, but I think we become immune to hearing these statistics. When it’s a real person and you learn about this family and their lives, it hits home that the changes we need to make aren’t abstract. It’s real lives.
