In 2023, I had the honour of interviewing Ben Westhoff about his 4-year research into the latest opioid epidemic, which at the time of the interview had caused in excess of 100000 deaths in the United States.
A deeply human story, Fentanyl, Inc. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. “A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape,” writes Ben Westhoff. “These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs”—and all-too-often tragically lethal.
Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice—and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe— were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes. Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay ahead of the law, making the drugs’ effects impossible to predict. Westhoff has infiltrated this shadowy world. He tracks down the little-known scientists who invented these drugs and inadvertently killed thousands, as well as a mysterious drug baron who turned the law upside down in his home country of New Zealand. Westhoff visits the shady factories in China from which these drugs emanate, providing startling and original reporting on how China’s vast chemical industry operates, and how the Chinese government subsidizes it. Poignantly, he chronicles the lives of addicted users and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug awareness organizers in the U.S. and Europe. Together they represent the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a calamity we are just beginning to understand. From its depths, as Westhoff relates, are emerging new strategies that may provide essential long-term solutions to the drug crisis that has affected so many.
Ben Westhoff is a St. Louis-based, award-winning investigative reporter who writes about culture, drugs, and poverty. His book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Created the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic is the bombshell’s first book about the fentanyl epidemic. Westhoff has become the go-to expert on the subject of fentanyl and new drugs, sought out for consultation by top government officials, including from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the U.S. State Department. He has appeared on full dedicated episodes of NPR’s Fresh Air and the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
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