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356 pages, Hardcover
First published September 3, 2019
Ben Westhoff's new book Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search For the Truth (May 24, 2022, Hachette Books) is a true crime memoir detailing his investigation into the unsolved killing of Jorell Cleveland, Westhoff's mentee in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program for 11 years. His previous book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Atlantic) is the highly-acclaimed, bombshell first book about fentanyl, which is causing the worst drug crisis in American history. It has received glowing reviews, was included on many year-end best lists, and Westhoff was featured on NPR's Fresh Air and Joe Rogan's podcast. He now speaks around the country about the fentanyl crisis, and has advised top government officials on the problem, including from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and the U.S. State Department.
Westhoff's previous book Original Gangstas: Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and the Birth of West Coast Rap is one of the best-selling hip-hop books of all time and has been translated into multiple languages, receiving top reviews from Rolling Stone, People, Kirkus, and others. S. Leigh Savidge, Academy Award nominee and co-writer of Straight Outta Compton said it "may be the best book ever written about the hip hop world."
Westhoff is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Library of Congress, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Rolling Stone, Vice, and others. His 2011 book on southern hip-hop, Dirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop was a Library Journal best seller.
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In 2017 American life expectancy declined for the third consecutive year, something that hadn't happened since the 1940s. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed the drop in part to fentanyl, which also appears to be driving down life expectancy in regions of Canada.
What a timely book! Some definitions are in order. Morphine and heroin are plant-based narcotics which are derived from a common flower. All plant-based narcotics are referred to as “opiates.” On the other hand, fentanyl is an incredibly powerful synthetic narcotic chemical compound which can only be created and produced in a chemistry laboratory. All synthetic narcotics are referred to as “opiods.”
Fentanyl is widely used during surgery in the medical community without harm or danger. But fentanyl has escaped into the real world with deadly consequences, and author Ben Westoff in Fentanyl, Inc: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opiod Epidemic has sounded the alarm.
Here's the problem: fentanyl is described as “fifty to one-hundred times stronger than heroin.” To users, that means that the amount they must use to achieve the same effect is fifty to one-hundred-times less than a comparable dose of heroin. Westoff reports that this means that a non-fatal dose of fentanyl may be only as large as a couple of grains of table salt. Ingesting any more than that can cause cardiac arrest, so there is very little margin for error by the user.
Since such a miniscule volume of fentanyl amounts to a full dose, this means that a big batch of the drug has a very small volume and is thus easy for smugglers to move across international borders. (The author's research makes clear that almost all of the street fentanyl smuggled into the US comes from factories in China or India.) Thus international smugglers adore fentanyl for the ease with which it can be secreted among legitimate goods and products in trans-continental shipping containers.
And this leads to the two reasons why fentanyl represents such a huge danger. First, the actual end purchasers and users of almost every type of synthetic street drug are being unwittingly killed in outbreaks numbering in the hundreds because the drug wholesalers and lower-level street dealers are cutting fentanyl into other drugs to “boost the effect and the high” without the users' knowledge and in non-standardized amounts. In fact more and more opiates or opiods (heroin, oxycontin) as well synthetic recreational drugs (MDMA (Ecstasy), LSD, and synthetic analogues far too numerous to name) are being adulterated by the dealers, both to boost the high and because fentanyl is cheaper than the pure substances which the purchasers believe they are buying. People – addicts as well as occasional recreational psychonauts – are dying by the scores from accidental overdoses of a drug they didn't know they had used or purchased, for passing few of the users have any idea that their dose contains fentanyl.
The second reason that fentanyl poses such a huge danger lies in its chemical structure. When a government declares a drug illegal, the statute banning that substance must specify precisely the exact chemical structure of the compound. This is called “scheduling” a drug. The problem is that when the government bans a newly-created synthetic opioid (also known as a “Novel Psychoactive Substance” or NPS) by scheduling it, only a substance made of that exact identical chemical structure and atomic makeup is covered by the ban.
And this is where the “rogue chemists” referenced by Ben Westoff in this book's title are at their most dangerous. For knowledgeable chemists, it is child's play to tweak a scheduled substance by adding a single atom or atomic group onto a complex molecule of known formula. This results in a NEW "Novel Psychoactive Substance" with a completely different chemical compound and formula than the outlawed “scheduled” drug. The critical difference is that, since the new compound has a completely different chemcal formula, it is therefore NOT scheduled and is thus completely legal to synthesize, import and market.
This is the point at which the Chinese chemical factories fit into this saga. From a Western point of view, the Chinese government often declines to rein in factories which create, produce, sell, and distribute these new substances which the Western governments have scheduled / banned. However, from the perspective of the Chinese government, just because the West bans a product which is produced in China does not necessarily make that product harmful or dangerous to China or to Chinese citizens. China thus deems it unnecessary to make such chemical compounds illegal under Chinese law. Therefore, Novel Psychoactive Substances which are banned in the US often remain completely legal in China. This means that Chinese producers are free to manufacture and market these drugs like any other legal product. The Chinese authorities believe that the Western drug problem arises not from the availability of the chemicals but from the failure of Western governments to control and crack down on their citizen-users, according to Westoff.
It has been proven many times in US history that prohibition does not work. Generally speaking, attempts by authorities to eradicate a drug - ANY drug – has shown that users will search until they find a substitute with comparable effects. History has demonstrated time and again that these newly-substituted formulations are as a rule far more harmful to both users and to society than the originally banned substance.
Nice work, Ben Westoff, for presenting cutting-edge information on a level which can be understood by knowledgeable readers.
My rating: 7.5/10, finished 10/22/19 (3401).