Fentanyl, Inc: How Corporate Sales Floors Dominate the New Drugs Market
Fentanyl, Inc: How Corporate Sales Floors Dominate the New Drugs Market
On the edge of Shanghai, men wearing balaclavas meet journalist Ben Westhoff at sunset. He’s blindfolded, pushed into a pickup truck, and driven out into the Chinese jungle. When the blindfold is removed, Westhoff sees men patrolling catwalks high above a factory floor, automatic weapons hanging from shoulder straps. Below them, ragtag chemists busily tend to vials and beakers in which fentanyl precursors boil. In this remote corner of the Chinese countryside, Westhoff has found the source of America’s “opioid epidemic.”
Just kidding.
Fentanyl, Inc: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Atlantic, September 2019) is the first book dedicated to the “third wave” of the overdose crisis, which claimed an estimated 68,000 lives in the US last year. (Filter, USA, 03.09.2019)