Book Reviewed: Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic, by Ben Westhoff

The Fentanyl Crisis

On April 15, 2016, on his way home after performing in Atlanta, pop entertainer Prince's plane made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois. He was found unresponsive and taken to a local hospital. Six days later, he passed away. Toxicology reports revealed that an overdose of opioid Fentanyl caused his demise. In January 2015, Bailey Henke, an 18-year-old kid from Grand Forks. North Dakota overdosed himself to death causing deep sorrow and dolor for his parents. Opioid Fentanyl put faces of the victims to its name. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that 20,000 Americans were killed by fentanyl, a highly addictive synthetic painkiller.
This synthetic opioid is 50 times more powerful than heroin. With street names such as Drop Dead, Murder 8, China white, China girl, dance fever and goodfella, fentanyl is marketed by drug dealers as the ultimate high.

These new drugs aren't grown in a field; they are made in a laboratory. Plants that yield marijuana and heroin were grown in Mexico and Latin America, but Fentanyl is manufactured in laboratories in China. The author dares to infiltrate Chinese drug operations, a sophisticated laboratory operation distilling outsize quantities of the world's most dangerous chemicals in industrial-size glassware. The Chinese drug industry is not run by cartels and criminal organizations, but by university-educated chemists who often play by their government's rules.

Many health-care workers who help treat substance abusers believe the American traditional focus on “supply-side” law enforcement, which emphasizes the prosecution over treatment is futile. This approach fails to address the root of the problem: demand, and under-funded addiction treatment programs. Other alternative harm-reduction program is taking center stage in combating opioid addiction. Experts agree that it would be easy to establish supervised-injection facilities for opioid-ravaged communities in the United States to create one-stop shops where people could test their heroin and fentanyl exchange needle and shoot up safely. On-site help would be ready with Narcan, and users could also receive counseling. Information and medical assistance are slowing the opioid crisis. These facilities are showing a track record of success, but federal and many state authorities are not enthusiastic. The tension is encapsulated in an October 2018 exchange when former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell announced that he had incorporated a nonprofit seeking private funding to open a supervised injection facility in Philadelphia. The US deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein angrily said that if one opened it would be immediately shut down by federal authorities. "I've got a message for Mr. Rosenstein," Rendell said, "They can come and arrest me first."

How is that lethal synthetic opioid is creating a global drug addiction crisis? The author presents a grim picture of the origin of the epidemic. He observes that the harm-reduction initiatives remain diluted beneath the shifting weight and influence of political red tape, global capitalism, and the biological and psychological bondage of drug dependency. He visits the shady factories in China from which these drugs emanate, providing startling and original reporting on how China's vast chemical industry operates. He chronicles the lives of addicts and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug-awareness organizers in the U.S. and Europe. This is a fascinating book that reads flawlessly and touches your consciousness when you read the stories of families affected by this tragedy.