Fentanyl, Inc.

How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic

By: Ben Westhoff

Narrated by: Alex Boyles

Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

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 US 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.

©2019 Ben Westhoff (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

The Best Current Book On the Drug Epidemic

I’m a physician interested in understanding why over 70,000 Americans died of drug overdose as last year. If you think you understand the subject you’re probably wrong. This book gives excellent insight into what is happening, why it is happening and practical suggestions for ending this largely preventable epidemic. This should be essential reading for drug users – – it may save their lives! It should also be widely read by legislators and law-enforcement officials. We won’t solve this problem without understanding it in all its complexity and using proven solutions that are successful in many other places around the world.

A must read

Just that. A good and informative read.
I am a health professional and I learned much.

Very informative!

So well written and deeply informative. I work as a nurse in the field of addiction and mental health. This book helped me gain so much more knowledge about the history, making and evolution of Fentanyl.

Bigger than Fentanyl

This is a thorough survey of the new opiates, most prominently fentanyl, but also fentaltl precursors and derivatives. Many of these are orders of magnitude more powerful than heroin, are often mixed with other drugs, killing people who didn't even know they'd taken it.

The author covers many angles --users, addicts, enforcement, clinics, legislators, foreign governments/ policies/ subsidies/ protections, distribution and trade, corruption, cartels and more. It's all well researched; his interviews and often undercover investigations are as thrilling as they are revealing.

The book culminates in what amounts to recommendation for decriminalization and treatment centers, testing of drugs on street, publishing the results, rather that "just say no" and waging a war on drugs and stigmitization of users. It's been tried plenty, and seems to work.

Absolutely intriguing

I absolutely loved this book. If you are interested in drugs, psychopharmacology, international relations, the dark web, and history then this book is right up your alley.

frightening

Incredible information everyone should be aware of and heed the warnings. Awareness can save lives.

Issue with sound

It's annoying that when the narrator starts a new sentence after a pause, the first word or 2 are muted out. I hope I can correct this and it's not an issue with ALL the audio books. I'm a new user.

Couldn't go on after the first chapter

The amount of propaganda and level of bias the author showed in the first chapter were more than I could bare.

It can be summed up in one of the many, many fear-mongering talking points presented early on. The author argued that fentanyl is more deadly than heroin, and used the fact that it can be 50 times more potent as evidence.

First and foremost, drugs are not inherently dangerous. If you take too much, it's not the fault of the drug, it's the administrator.

Secondly, requiring a lower dose can be a benefit or it can be a problem. A responsible drug user would be safe regardless as no one wants to overdose and die.

Other reviews remarked the author supports decriminalization, but I implore anyone reading this to not take his ignorant and dehumanizing highroad of saying "let these subhumans get their drugs clean" and actually consider the issue of freedom here and not mask it as a way of helping the subhumans getting cleaner drugs.

This book spent the first hour highlighting how people whose lives were a complete mess to begin with were "tragically undone by the evils of new science and fentanyl" without considering the countless, totally normal closeted users who drastically outnumber them.

Anyone could be a drug user, so the idea that people whose lives are falling apart can also be drug users at the same time shouldn't be a surprise, right?

So then, if their life is falling apart, is it sensible to say it's the drug's fault for that, as if being sober would be the deciding factor to magically stop a cocktail of other self destructive choices also bringing this person down?

Whether they became a user before the decline began or after, how can the choices of some to use more than they should and/or at a time when they shouldn't get used here to cast a shadow over all the responsible, respectable users? For instance, the two 17 year olds in the beginning - seriously, the problem is that teenagers shouldn't be taking drugs, not that they took fentanyl! Alcohol isn't the problem when kids die from alcohol poisoning, fentanyl wasn't the problem when these kids died, and trees aren't the problem when a kid falls off one and dies.

Why is this a problem? Focusing on these individuals demonizes the whole group, just the same as it did when propaganda said that LGBT people were sick and predatory subhumans. Doing this closets all the "respectable" people who don't want to be destroyed by society's collective hatred and oppression of regular people.

Thank you for listening to my TED talk.

Oh yeah, and the narrator did a great job.

Great Resource!

This is a great resource for those seeking to understand emerging trends on illegal drug use. Provides professional grade research combined with many interesting case studies and interviews.

Great reader

The fastest speed I’ve ever listened to a book was 1.3x, but the reader is Super clear and easy to understand so much so that I was able to crank it up to 2.3x and finish the entire book in 1 working shift.