"Fentanyl, Inc." by Ben Westhoff
I was given a galley of Fentanyl, Inc. after I wrote about overdose prevention spaces this summer, but I didn’t read it right away because, frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a whole book about fentanyl. It sounded unbearably grim, and I had just spent months reporting, researching, talking, and thinking about substance use disorders and the havoc they cause, which was rough. It was a worthwhile pursuit, and I am planning to write more about drug policy and harm reduction in the future, but I needed to take a break from thinking about it as much as I was.
And so Fentanyl, Inc. sat in my backpack for the rest of the summer, abandoned among random pens, receipts I keep forgetting to expense, stale gum, and Jacob Riis beach sand. I brought it to Paw Paw Lake, Michigan, where I celebrated my sister’s engagement, and didn’t read a single page. I hauled it to a teensy cabin in Cle Elum, Washington, where I celebrated my friend Kika’s wedding, and where the book remained unopened in my suitcase as we danced at a dude ranch. I brought it on a reporting trip to Toronto, where I promised myself I’d read it as I clomped around the city and suburbs interviewing people; instead, I bought two novels at Type Books on Queen West, and tore through those, and then spent the rest of the trip reading legal documents for work. (Well…most of the rest of the trip… I also smoked [legal] weed one night out of a hollowed-out cucumber that my friend Laura and I cut into an improvised bong because we’re not very mature and we thought it would be funny.) (It was funny.) (I didn’t do any work that night, though.) When I got back to Brooklyn, I unpacked the book for the third time in as many weeks and wondered if I’d ever read it.
But here I am now, wholeheartedly recommending Fentanyl, Inc., which I reluctantly picked up out of sheer guilt but finished in a weekend because it was way too interesting to leave unfinished. Ben Westhoff spent four years reporting this book, and the breadth of his knowledge about the global synthetic drug trade is astonishing—he interviews dealers who buy and sell online, grieving parents, harm reduction experts, law enforcement, Chinese industrial manufacturers, and the people who serve as cogs within their corporations. He untangles a confusing and massive transnational industry and grounds the work by showcasing how human most of the people involved in this almost-always-sensationalized world are. Yes, there are violent and horrid cartel leaders and greedy, uncaring manufacturing tycoons involved, but for the most part this is a story about people who have no grand nefarious intentions, just pressing economic concerns, or substance use problems of their own, or pressing economic concerns and substance use problems.
I learned so much, and instead of feeling depressed, I felt I like understood the geopolitical intricacies of the drug trade more clearly….which made me feel hopeful, even though one of the most obvious takeaways from this book is that policy which attempts to eradicate the presence of specific substances does not tend to actually reduce harmful substance use, and can often make it worse. (Westhoff goes deep on how attempts to banish substances like LSD and MDMA have ended up spurring the development of many newer and often far more dangerous substances meant to mimic the effects of these drugs.) Fentanyl, Inc. is a clarifying read for anyone on the fence about the potential for harm reduction initiatives.
It’s also one of those books where you feel compelled to write stuff like “UMMMMM What?” and “??!!!!” in the margins on every other page. Did you know that Vancouver’s real estate market was majorly impacted by a fentanyl money-laundering scheme? Or that there was an offshoot of the CIA’s MKUltra project called Midnight Climax which enlisted sex workers to give their clients LSD so that the CIA could secretly watch what happened to people who had sex on LSD? Did you know that one of the country’s most infamous psychedelic-dealing organizations, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, ran a money laundering operation out of a decommissioned missile base in Kansas? I did not know these things, until I read Fentanyl, Inc.