Why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything?

Isn't it bad business to kill your own customers?

Opium poppy with resin, used for heroin. (Fentanyl is synthetic and made in a lab.)

Hi Searchers,

It’s Friday, and we have a new story for you. This is a question I’ve been curious about for a very long time. We’ve seen so many news stories, for years now, about fentanyl. First it was heroin users dying of fentanyl overdoses, but not long after, it was everyone else. People trying to buy cocaine, Xanax, pain pills. Regular people, friends, celebrities.

It was awful, but also, it was confusing. Isn't it bad business to kill your own customers? Why would even a ruthless drug dealer want to do this?

I always wanted to know. I have a much better understanding now.

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In this story, the answer is interesting enough that we wanted to explain it from two different perspectives. This first episode is really a very twisted supply chain story. A business story where what brought us to this point was not consumer demand but rather the drug dealers’ supply of a substance they wanted American users to take.

We’ll have part two of this story next week, an interview with a former fentanyl dealer we spoke to in March. I haven’t stopped thinking about him since.

Also, check out Ben Westhoff’s book if you haven’t, I highly recommend it.

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A recommendation for further viewing this week

If you found this topic as fascinating as I did, I have a recommendation.

A documentary I really loved about all this is The Crime of the Century. It’s directed by Alex Gibney, who runs Jigsaw, the company we work with on Search Engine. It’s a two-parter, both parts are pretty tremendous. Part One focusses on the Sacklers. It includes an interview with a man whose wife was prescribed unnecessary pain pills by her doctor, and chronicles his fight to try to get the guy to stop pushing them on her. It’s heartbreaking.

Part Two tells the story of Subsys, a company that pushed Fentanyl nasal spray to patients in a very similar way as the Sacklers pushed Oxy. There is an extended interview with a person who worked at Subsys that is just one of the most darkly comic portraits of the downsides of American capitalism I have ever seen.

Another reason to check out the documentary is there are some great interviews with Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain. We mention that book in the episode, it’s Keefe’s opus. It’s the story of the Sackler family inventing and popularizing Oxycontin, but also a story about how pharmaceutical marketing works in America. It feels almost silly to recommend it at this point, as it’s been so lauded, but in case you’ve missed it, go grab a copy.

Links to Resources mentioned this week

Here’s a link for DanceSafe.org, where you can find fentanyl test strips. There’s instructions for use at the link for the strips themselves, but here’s a video of someone explaining how to use them.

The other website we mentioned is DrugsData.org, which gives you a rolling update of what’re in the illicit drugs sent it by strangers. You might be able to see what’s happening in your city, depending on where you live.

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Okay! That’s all for us this week. Impatient to share next week’s episode, but we will see you next Friday.

Thank you, as always, for listening,

PJ

PS. One correction, a line we changed after initial publication, and a bit of backstory as to why.

So in the piece, I initially wrote:

“I recently read about fentanyl showing up in store-bought weed gummies outside Philadelphia.”

We changed that line to read,

“I recently read about fentanyl showing up in store bought weed gummies outside Philadelphia, although the tests proved inconclusive.”

The backstory to this: there was a news report in Montgomery County, PA where the District Attorney said that fentanyl had been found in weed gummies. Later, they re-tested that same brand of weed gummies and did not find fentanyl. It’s unclear what’s going on here — if fentanyl was in some of the gummies but not the later ones they tested, or if better lab equipment produced a more accurate result and the gummies were in fact clean.

Fentanyl contamination in weed is a relatively frequent debate online. Some people believe it’s very rare, other people believe it never happens. Fentanyl apparently, breaks down at temperatures lower than the flame from a lighter, which would mean that lacing fentanyl into a joint wouldn’t be very effective. On the other hand — there are a couple reported instances from drugsdata.org of weed being dusted with fentanyl, and as we say in the episode, their mass spectrometer results are highly reliable.

With reporting on illicit markets, we’re trying to strike a balance - giving people information that can help them keep safe, but not contributing to a climate of anxiety. Anyway, we tweaked the line to better reflect the uncertainty here.