“Why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything?” from Search Engine

Nora sits down with her friend and fellow podcaster PJ Vogt of Search Engine. They discuss what he found in his own interviews with a drug dealer who used fentanyl in his drug supply. That, plus the original Search Engine episode are included here.

If you have not yet listened to this week’s TTFA episode, “86 Sundays,” we suggest you go back and listen so you can see why we were inspired to share this Search Engine episode with you.

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Original Search Engine episode description: We speak to Luis, a former fentanyl dealer and user who tells us why a dealer might want to put fentanyl in less lethal drugs. Luis also tells us how he learned the rules of dealing, and how the rules changed over his multi-decade career.

If you have questions or comments about this episode, or if you'd like to support the show, head to our newsletter: pjvogt.com. 

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The episode transcript can be found here.

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Transcripts are not in their final form and are subject to change

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THEME CHIME

[INTRO FROM NORA] 

Nora: PJ, tell me, um, what is search engine?

PJ: Search Engine is a podcast, uh, where me and my team try to answer the kinds of questions that people have that maybe like keep them up at night or that feel like oh this is like it's my question but like everybody must have already asked this because I haven't seen an answer to it. Like we try to throw human beings at the kinds of questions you would ask the internet alone but get an unsatisfying answer to.

Nora: There are two episodes, one of which our listeners are about to hear, that address a question that I think in the first episode you say, God, there's gotta be an answer for this one. But it is one of those questions that I would be almost embarrassed to say out loud, almost embarrassed to type into Google.

PJ: Yeah

Nora: it's, it's this big, big question, which is if we're in the midst of how many, how many drug crises are we in the middle of? Countless?

PJ: countless so we yes yes there's fentanyl there's xylosine laced fentanyl there's something called super meth um it's like a very bad moment yeah the

Nora: Yeah. Yeah. Just this morning, I woke up to a new crisis, which is super meth. Um, but why? Will you repeat the question

PJ: um, I believe verbatim it was, it is, Why would drug dealers, oh, I think the way we posed the question was, Why is fentanyl in everything now? Or else it was, why would drug dealers, Why would drug dealers want to kill their own customers with fentanyl? Why, why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything?

Nora: right. Why are they? Because I, Fentanyl was, I, I'd still was unsure what it was even until, until your podcast. And then I, after listening to the first episode, I subsequently had a surgery where I was on it. And you know what I have to say? Not a fan.

PJ: Oh, really? Oh, the experience of it.

Nora: Hated it. Made me feel sick. I woke up and was like, I'm going to throw up.

I'm going to throw up. I hate it. I hated the feeling of it. Um, the person you interviewed described it as a soulless high. And I really did feel when I woke up from all the anesthesia that I, my soul was gone and I was just a shell of a person. I hated it. I really hated it. So how do you start to answer that question?

Why is fentanyl in everything?

PJ: So, so in the first episode, we, we do kind of like, we kind of do it as a business story. Like, why does this thing that no one, how, how has it come to happen that like this thing that nobody really wants, like a dangerous adulterant end up in a vast illicit drug supply. And one of the first surprises for me is that fentanyl started out as a benign hospital drug.

Like it was synthesized by a Belgian chemist who synthesized a lot of drugs. He synthesized Imodium. He was seen as a hero. And when fentanyl was invented, the way it was looked at was, look, people go to the hospital for surgeries. They're going to take some type of opioid or opiate painkiller. The benefit of fentanyl is that it's strong, but it goes away quickly.

And so if you need to be Like numbed for something or put down for something you will be able to go home You'll be able to leave the hospital faster and for decades and decades and decades. The thinking was well human beings for A very long time have found opioid drugs to be addictive and some people have sought them out.

People, smart people thought that would never happen with fentanyl because the fact that it's powerful and fast acting means that it kind of is not a good experience for an illicit drug user. You get high, it goes away very quickly. You want to get high again. Like fentanyl, even versus something as dangerous and scary as heroin.

The heroin high is much longer. And so a heroin addict might be able to have a more functional life because they could dose in the morning and be fine for a while. Whereas someone who's addicted to fentanyl is going to have to dose much sooner.

Nora: I'm gonna paraphrase yourself back to you, but you said something really smart in that first episode, which is that the stories that we tell ourselves about drugs change, and the story of fentanyl has certainly changed, but nearly every drug that people take that they are addicted to or abuse or misuse in some way started with a different story.

The episode that we just aired. A woman lost her little sister, a person who was like a vibrant part of her community, was a person who trained other servers at work, and, you know, a young mom, and, you know, she had her life together, really had a life she loved. And took cocaine with her boyfriend and some friends at home.

So, you know, kind of like the safest way to party, right? Like, you're at home, you're among friends. And it was laced with fentanyl and all but one of them died. And even the story of cocaine is like, what was the coca in Coca Cola?

PJ: Right, right. And even more recently, you know, I think like everybody, every adult. makes their own decisions about, like, what drugs to take and put in their body. And that's, like, illicit drugs, that's not illicit

Nora: mm hmm.

PJ: But you grow up in a context where, like, in the suburb that I'm from, there were kids, like, as we were going to college who were experimenting with cocaine.

There were not a lot of kids who were experimenting with heroin. Like, heroin was a big, scary, hard drug. Cocaine was, like, a scary drug. People are just sort of in the, in the sort of grapevine description of how risky something was. That was what the decision that had been made and I think one of the things that's scary and strange about fentanyl is because it gets adulterated into a lot of drugs that you wouldn't expect it to be in.

It's like the stories that we've heard or that we tell about how risky something is can become outdated very quickly and it's really hard to for anyone to know what to do because if you're participating in an illicit market, there's no regulation. There's no buyer protection. And like, it's not like, I don't mean to suggest that this sort of thing happens all the time everywhere, but it happens enough.

And it's awful enough when it happens that I think it's like really confusing for people to know what to do.

Nora: Yeah, if it hasn't happened to somebody that you know, Um, you just might not know that that's how they died, um, but it certainly happened to somebody who knows somebody that you know. You definitely know somebody who knows somebody who has lost somebody this way, is what I'm trying to say.

PJ: Yeah, that has been, I mean, here in Brooklyn, that's been my experience, like a lot of people, there's a lot of secondhand stories, not like thirdhand, but secondhand stories about it happening. When people die of drug overdoses, you don't always know that they've died of a drug overdose. You don't always know what drugs they took or if they knew, but the stories of this happening are definitely circulating.

Nora: What else did you learn about, uh, how fentanyl got into everything? Because it does feel like it's everywhere.

PJ: So one of the surprising things we learned is that unlike sort of most goods that become popular. And I know it's weird to describe fentanyl as a good, but we were really trying to think of this as a business story. It didn't become popular because people wanted to take it. Like drug users were not asking for a more dangerous worse high version of heroin.

It happened because dealers wanted to cut their product with something cheaper. And one of the big moments that made this happen was actually like, I think a lot of people are familiar with the story of Oxycontin and how many Americans became addicted to opioids because of it. But actually at the moment that the US government finally stepped in and started to regulate Oxy prescriptions, what that accidentally did is it took a bunch of people who had now become addicted, and it cut them off from their supply. And so when those people got cut off from their supply, they went to the black market, they went to the illicit market, and they started trying to buy heroin.

There were enough Americans trying to buy heroin that there was not enough heroin to sell to them. And so now the fentanyl.

But once they started doing that, fentanyl's cheaper, it can be synthesized like more easily in smaller labs, it's harder to detect, and so once they started discovering that they could cut this in and it would work, the incentive was just to keep doing it. And people we spoke to who were either in the illicit market or knew the illicit market well will say that at this point, like, it's very rare to find actual pure heroin, that it's usually fentanyl or else it's fentanyl.

It's people who are now trying to buy fentanyl and who are getting fentanyl cut with some heroin, which is just one of the more dystopian phrases that I had encountered this year.

Nora: Oh, it feels like it. Everything is at this vortex of various failures of our U. S. healthcare system, um. And to me, it feels like a part of that is that all of these drug companies are publicly traded, all of our health insurance companies are publicly traded, our healthcare systems are a part of the public market, and I don't think that you can serve two masters, I don't think that you can put people and their care, the center of what you are doing, while also trying to maximize shareholder value.

I think those things are diametrically opposed.

PJ: Yeah, I think, like, I think there can be a ruthlessness. in American capitalism. Obviously, I'm not like the first person to notice this, but what's weird in the story of Fentanyl is that you see that ruthlessness in the like legit daytime world where you see, you know, companies like Purdue Pharma bearing a lot of information that their, that their product wasn't safe and like letting a lot of people become addicted and die because there's a profit motive.

Um, and then you see that same behavior being mirrored in the underground market where you have unscrupulous dealers who are already selling their users, like. Dangerous drugs, but who then are lying about which dangerous drugs they're selling and giving something people that's worse And it's sort of like I don't know.

It's really scary and it's really sad and it's hard There's certain ideas or problems in American life that are so awful You just you see you see something happen and you just wish the bell could be unrung you wish it could be Uninvented and fentanyl is just one of those things. It's like a really once it exists a lot of our ideas about how to stop a dangerous drug from spreading, which were never very good ideas to begin with.

Like, we've always struggled with this, but fentanyl really eludes them. And like, the argument about what to do about this epidemic, like, I see a lot of people talking past each other. I have not seen that many amazing, effective ideas. I've seen some theories, but it's very hard.

Nora: Did this make you feel, did working on these two episodes make you feel more hopeful or more hopeless?

PJ: Not more hopeful. Um, it made me feel like I really wanted to make sure my friends knew about drug testing and my friends knew to buy fentanyl strips and I'm happy that the actual technology behind fentanyl strips has gotten a lot better. There's an organization called DanceSafe that you can go to, you can buy strips, you can put them in illicit drugs and, and try to find out what is actually in the thing that you have.

I think what's hard without getting like into like, or maybe briefly dipping into like some drug war politics, is that like, we've kind of had two ideas about drugs. If you're from the more conservative law and order side, the idea is you just got to arrest all these drug dealers, arrest all these drug users.

If you make everyone too scared to do drugs, they'll go away. It hasn't worked that well historically, but particularly with fentanyl, the problem is if you bust a big heroin dealer, if you knock out heroin, which is more expensive to cultivate, requires more land, you create the incentive for more fentanyl.

Fentanyl is made in small labs, often but not always in China. It's sent, it's like a very small product, so it's easy to smuggle in. It's sent to Mexico, usually. or at least a few years ago, this is how it was happening. It was sent to Mexico, and then like finished there and moved into the country. The idea that you'll just sort of catch everybody is harder with fentanyl.

And if you're catching everybody with the other drugs, you're like increasing the incentive for the fentanyl market. But then on the progressive side, there's this idea about harm reduction, which I think is smart and valuable. It's the idea of like, well, you can't really. help someone who's addicted if they die.

And so the best thing to do is, like, safe injection sites and clean needles and generally decriminalizing. Um, but I don't, without, like, I'm just not sure that that is, like, an entirely effective solution to fentanyl. Like, I don't know. It's so dangerous. It's so corrosive in the places where it really spreads.

The idea of criminalizing addiction, I don't really support. But, like, if those are the two sides we've had in the drug war, It kind of feels like Fentanyl is going to need a more, a new kind of solution and I just don't know what that solution is and that's really scary.

Nora: Yeah, especially because all of these things are so interconnected. And if you're looking at systems, people exist within systems like big ones, you know, like whatever, you know, city and state and community. Uh, safety nets exist or don't their families, their own personal situations and everyone is themselves almost kind of an unknowable equation too, which it makes all of these things very complicated.

There's also this sort of, um, morality side to things that definitely exists in the us like are sort of just very reflexive. Puritanical instincts to say, like, well, doing drugs is bad.

PJ: Right.

Nora: So like, don't do them when, you know, again, what do you classify as a drug? Because cocaine used to be a medicine, and even medicines that you took for a long time that I've taken are, could be a medicine, or could be a party drug.

Could be any of them.

PJ: America has like, conflicted attitudes towards a lot of things that we both, um, judge and enjoy. I find, I find the line between like, this is a medicine and this is a drug to be one of the more flimsy and confusing distinctions we draw with, you know, with a drug like amphetamine. If you get it from a prescriber, you would call it a medicine.

If you buy it on the street, you would call it speed. Oftentimes, it's either the same compound or a very similar compound. With opioids or opiates, like opiates is when it's like from a poppy seed in the wild. Opioid is when it's synthesized in a lab. But like the The Sacklers, who were making Oxy, looked down on people who were addicted to it as like, street addicts.

But the thing they were selling, the chemical compound, was very similar to morphine. It was very similar to heroin. Like, the, we don't know whether it's okay to take drugs or not, but we often want to. And so a lot of times the way we deal with that is to kind of label the things other people do drugs and the things we do medicines.

Or to say, if I got this from a doctor, it's a medicine. If I got this from the street, it's a drug. And I'm not saying that that. Heuristic's never right. It's just that following that heuristic has gotten some people to take more dangerous compounds than they should have while not having sympathy or compassion for people who are actually making very similar choices to them, but just in a different context.

I just think it's hard. Like, I don't have answers. And part of what I don't want to say I like about the Fentanyl story, because like, the story of Fentanyl in America is a deeply tragic one. But what I appreciate about it, and the reason I'm drawn to trying to understand it, is because it is so... And it requires you to hold competing ideas in your head at the same time.

You see a little bit of people simplifying it. There are Republicans who are like, we should bomb Mexico and that'll take care of this. Um, for the most part, I actually find that a lot of the people who talk about this problem respect its complexity.

Nora: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I do think. You know, as time goes on too, it's inevitable, or it feels inevitable, that more and more people are going to feel this impact. And this does feel different than I mean, maybe it's just like a function of getting older, but this feels different than a lot of various panics that I've lived through as a child of, you know, the eighties and nineties when we were terrified that somebody was going to put a razor blade in our apple.

Or, you know, as I got older, you know, we, we went to dare our dare officer, PJ. Brought drugs to our classroom.

PJ: That's

Nora: And like, I fact checked this with my friends. I was like, did I make this up or did he pass them around and describe what they would do? And they were like, no, he passed them around. Passed around a bag of weed, passed around a bag of cocaine, who knows if it was.

And he was like, cocaine will make you feel like you can do anything. But it'll also ruin your life. And I always remembered that too. I was like, well... It will make me feel like I can do anything, it will ruin my life. And, you know, of all the things that we were warned against, you know, I don't know.

It's like, I think we also do have this sort of, you know, sliding scale of. What is moral and what is okay and, you know, um, if you have like, and you can see that with drinking, you can see it with speed slash Adderall, you can see it with, uh, with Coke, you can see it with, um, Like all these various things, but I can't remember where I was going with this.

PJ: I mean, what I find interesting about what you're saying is like. One of the things I see in how people react to stories about fentanyl, so there is hysteria around fentanyl. There are, there's all these, there's these stories that regularly go viral of police officers who will bust somebody for fentanyl and they'll say that just contact with the drug through their skin has given them an overdose, which is not, that's not how the drug works.

It's not possible. What they're actually having probably is a panic attack. And so those stories will get broadcast and then more progressive minded drug people will be like, look, look, it's a moral panic. And if. I think what's sort of happening there is that we were all educated in the like, dare era of if you smoke pot, you will become addicted to cocaine or crack and die.

And we got a lot of like, very, like, high, like, sort of high intensity, high volume absence messages about drugs. And some people in our generation became adults and like, realized like, some of those messages were not entirely accurate. And so it's hard with fentanyl. is you have people saying some of the same things like, Hey, this is really dangerous.

It's really hard to do this safely. You need to be careful. And I think a lot of people hear echoes of the 80s and 90s. Um, but it is really dangerous. Like a lot of Americans are overdosing. If you look at the numbers, it's like a leading cause of death for Americans. And so, like, Right now, the, the equation for people taking illicit drugs is just different than it was and adults should do what feels right for them.

But, having education about it, I think it's a good idea. Drug testing is very important right now, I think. And like, I don't know, ignoring that reality because it's awful, I don't think gets anyone closer to a place where this could begin to get better.

Nora: Yeah. There's also this, the story that we broadcast is, you know, not, I think it's an overdose if you know. What you're doing and it's a poisoning if you don't and you know one is an accident and one is a crime, it's the difference between being killed and dying almost and it's I think hard for when people hear fentanyl I think there's almost something when something becomes like an epidemic it almost becomes like so big that it's easy to forget like these are individual people and every person is kind of the center of at least one person's universe, right?

And you deserve whatever you're doing to do it with like some safety like the side effect of doing coke should be You know, maybe crapping your pants the next day or, you know, like,

PJ: having a lot of loudly stated opinions that no one respects.

Nora: like doing something like a little, like, wacky, um, you know, not, you know, dying in your kitchen with your, with your baby in the next room.

And, um, I think sometimes when people die in a way. that's like tied to like a bigger phenomenon. It feels like there's almost like a lack of, or like this, our compassion meter goes down, our empathy meter goes down. Instead of like going up and being like, wow, this happened to you too. Instead of just like, uh add another number to the tally.

PJ: Well, also because, because Americans have disagreements about drugs, I think a story like that becomes evidence in a bunch of people's arguments. And so they don't always, even people who might know the person don't take, they don't feel it the way they should feel it because it's fitting into, as you say, like this larger thing.

And it's, I mean, I think it's just, it's awful. Like, I think it's awful that somebody took. They made a choice that they understood to have a certain amount of risk priced in, and instead it was a much riskier choice than they could have understood.

There's vast and loud debate about, like, where in the drug food chain adulteration is happening. There's people who believe that it's happening higher, closer to the cartels, and there's people who think it happens lower at the level of... The people who are actually selling to people like that, like that, you know, the product comes down and comes down and comes down and it gets flattened or stepped on each step of the way.

But that adulteration tends to happen towards the end. The question we were trying to answer is, why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything? 

THEME CHIME

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Search Engine Episode

Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. This is Search Engine. This week on the show, part two of us tackling what we thought might be a basic question about fentanyl. The question we're answering, why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in drugs that would not normally be lethal? If you haven't heard part one, please start there.

Also, This week's episode, more than last week's, is just not a good one for kids. Obviously, because of the subject matter, but also, if I'm honest, it's just about a kind of darkness that human beings can exhibit to each other that I think is more appropriate for adults. After some ads, Lois.

In March, I went to visit a rehab in East Harlem. This place, it's called Odyssey House. Walking in, we pass a letter board with a message in all caps. You must be willing to get rid of the life you planned so you can live the life you have. The people here are trying to get sober. From drugs or alcohol, some of the people here are coming here from prison.

We'd spoken to a woman who helps run Odyssey House, and she'd arranged to put us in touch with a few people in the program. She led us downstairs into a small conference room with art on the walls painted by residents. And then... One of those residents walked in. The man we spend the morning with. Okay, let me just get a level.

Um, can I just ask you, this is just so I can get volume levels, right? Can I ask you what you had for breakfast this morning? I had a banana and orange juice. I'm working on my diet right now. Okay, that sounds pretty good to me. Can you tell me your name and how old you are? My name is Louis. I'm 50 years old.

Lewis. A short Latino man with a shaved head. He looked young for 50. I actually talked to a few people before finding Lewis, some drug dealers, some drug users, people who had theories about why fentanyl was showing up in the rest of the drug supply. They said things like it might be an accident, people cutting one drug with another added fentanyl by mistake, or another dealer told me he thought greedy street level dealers were throwing it in there to cover up bad product they'd received.

But nobody was sure, because none of them had actually touched fentanyl themselves. Lewis was different. He'd used fentanyl. He'd sold fentanyl. And the story of his life, his career in drugs, it helped me understand the logic of the world that was creating this problem. And you're, you're sober now. You were a drug user before?

Yes, I'm seven months and two weeks clean today. And when you used drugs, did you sell drugs or did you sell drugs separately? In the beginning of my career, I started off selling drugs. I was using marijuana, I drank a little bit, and um, by the age of 14, I was sniffing cocaine. Got it. And what were you, when did you start selling?

When I started selling drugs, I was selling crack cocaine. A little bit of heroin, but crack cocaine. And how old were you? I was 13. I was 13 years old. My mother was an addict. So when my mother and my father broke up, which he was also an addict, um. We were homeless. So, I helped my mother out and helped myself out.

I'd sell drugs, my mother would sell illegal numbers. So she would, um, get her money for her addiction and... And when you say sold numbers, it was like the sort of underground lottery? Yeah, the illegal lottery. And, um, I sold drugs so that she didn't have to do worse things for her addiction. And so we can eat and have a place to stay.

And this is like, um... I'm just trying to like, place this in time, like what they It was in 1985. Got it. And crack was just beginning to become a, a problem. That nobody saw how big it was gonna become. I need to tell you about what Lewis's neighborhood was like before crack arrived. His story just doesn't make sense otherwise.

Starting in the late 70s, a series of fires tore through the South Bronx. Most of them arson. 80 percent of all housing was lost. People compared what was left to European cities after World War II. Nowhere urban decay and blight more apparent than in the South Bronx. The home of Ladder 33 and Engine 75 of the 19th Battalion.

This clip is from a 1979 local news report called Hell on Earth. It's actually hosted by John Johnson, the famous black documentary producer. As he narrates, they show footage of what looks like entire city blocks swallowed up in flames, firemen rushing into the chaos. This is the busiest firehouse in the world.

During 1977 and 78. When I was born and growing up, the Bronx was burning down still. My neighborhood was one building. So we had projects to the left of us, we had projects to the right of us, but everything around my building was a junkyard. Nearly half a million people were displaced from the South Bronx in this period.

In Lewis neighborhood, One unlikely force of stability was actually the drug dealers. Lewis says that the old school heroin dealers, they belonged to local crews, not the city wide gangs that would dominate later. Which meant that before crack, dealers more often lived in the neighborhoods they sold in.

Lewis says, despite what their job was, and what it did to their neighborhoods, these heroin dealers operated under a code. Their version of civic responsibility. So they try to give back, like you had the old gangsters in the neighborhood buying school supplies. Entire buildings were getting free turkeys, free turkeys for Thanksgiving.

Like I remember that. Like I used to get that, um, if the kids needed stuff for, for school, sneakers, t shirts, whatever. You know, the big thing about selling drugs when I was selling drugs, the neighborhood had to look like it wasn't going on. The old ladies had to be able to sit in front of the building.

The kids had to be able to play because once that stopped, now your neighborhood became hot with the police. So, if the cops can't drive by and see that the girl's playing double dutch, the kid's playing catch in the street, once that stops, they know your neighborhood is no good, now they're gonna harass you.

So the old dealers pass that down. Like, I was selling drugs, I was making pretty good money before the addiction got the best of me, and I was still going to the store for the old ladies in the building, I was still carrying grocery bags, because that's what you did in your neighborhood, you know. I was doing it when I was a little boy, so I didn't stop when I became an older man.

Because, you know, these, these were my mother's friends and stuff like that, so that didn't stop. I didn't smoke a cigarette in front of my building until I was 18, and I shot somebody when I was 13. That's insane. Listen, um, when you get a chance, look up 1993, the South Bronx Massacre, Valentine's Day.

Tonight, police are trying to crack the case of a Bronx massacre where six people were found shot to death, execution style, in an apartment on Prospect Avenue. I did look it up, and I found a news clip from the massacre Lewis referenced. You see the reporter doing a stand up on the street. The South Bronx Massacre.

These murders took place in a six story red brick tenement building. Six people killed, shot face down on a living room floor. Kathy Wolf has been following the story and has details tonight from the 40th precinct. Kathy? Harry, we are at the 40th Precinct where the investigation is underway. Uh, what you said is true.

The murder took place about five miles from here at 152nd Street and Prospect Avenue in a neighborhood that is known for violence and drugs. Now the police say they don't know... In the video, you see corpses being removed in body bags. Lewis said the killer was a friend of his. This is a kid that I grew up with since we were little.

We sold drugs together. We went dancing, swimming, clubbing. We did everything together. He was months older than me. 21 years old, killed six people on Valentine's Day. This is a kid that he didn't smoke in front of his mother, still, then. Because his mother didn't play that. His mother did not play that. But did she understand what his job was?

Yeah. But there's certain things you still respect. Take your hat off when you walk in the house. Take your sneakers off. Like, clean up your room, make your bed, throw out the garbage. Yeah. You just did it because... You were raised that way. In the mix of all of the, the drama, we still had those rules that applied.

Like it's, to understand it, it's probably going to take so much because none of it makes sense, but to us it made sense. As long as that old lady could walk around that block and nobody's going to mess with her. Then I'm doing my job, I'm 15 years old, I'm selling drugs, I got guns on me, I gotta worry about the drug addicts coming to rob me, I gotta worry about the stick up kids because you have people that robbed drug dealers as their job, right?

The cops coming to either rob us or arrest us, right? And you still had to make your neighborhood look like nothing is going on. I found these stories remarkable. Lewis's telling of an earlier era of New York City drug dealers, who were as polite to old ladies as they were lethal to their rivals. Later, I did run all this by an administrator who's worked in the rehab we're in in this community for years.

She was a little skeptical. She said basically that former drug dealers, like all of us, have a tendency to romanticize the past. But for Lewis part, he says this all happened. And he says he knows it was like this because he remembers when it all went away. In the mid 80s, in the Bronx and in Harlem, street dealers were switching en masse from heroin to crack.

The ensuing crack epidemic, which Lewis would do his part to help inflame, would pretty quickly rewrite the logic that had governed his neighborhood. According to Lewis, this etiquette that had survived during the years of fires and poverty, it would not survive the next chapter. Crack changed all of that.

Crack changed all of that. Whole lot of mothers disappeared. Whole lot of fathers disappeared. You had grandmothers raising kids, then these are making kids. The kid that took over the neighborhood

So they didn't respect it the same. When they got it, it's cause we left it. Or we went away or we got murdered. So when they took it, all they knew was that we were the tough guys in the neighborhood. We were the guys to look up to in the neighborhood. They knew about the things that we did in the neighborhood.

So they wanted to mimic that without ever playing a role in the maintenance of the neighborhood. I've read a lot about the war on drugs, and on the people who used and sold them. I've read a lot about its unintended consequences. I'd never considered this one. According to the New York Times, when Lewis started dealing in 1985, there were 9, 815 people in jail in New York.

Less than four years later, that number had nearly doubled. What was lost may have been a kind of institutional value, this idea that even a drug dealer owed something to their neighborhood. That's Lewis's memory anyway. But what is uncontested by anyone is that crack cocaine did a generation's worth of damage, through addiction, through crime.

through incarceration. It was an old drug, administered in a new way, but that was enough to change how people related to each other, how they preyed on each other. By his own description, Lewis was one of those people who preyed on his neighbors. He says he sold crack to thousands of people. He says he remembers selling crack to pregnant women.

He remembers watching one woman take a hit, so skinny he says he could see her stomach move when the crack hit her system. So high himself that he didn't have a feeling besides just being creeped out. He's not proud of what he's done. He says he wanted to share his story of that era, and his role in it, because he thought it might help.

It might serve as some sort of warning. He says the best use for his life he can imagine right now is to serve as a bad example. Decades later, the crack era would be over. Lewis would be in prison, upstate, and he'd see a new era begin. A new era in which he'd play the same role. The Fentanyl Era.

Welcome back to the show. In the late 1990s, as the crack era was waning, Lewis was arrested. He'd do two bids. In 2015, he'd be in prison in Buffalo, New York, where he'd get a front row seat to the beginning of a new era. Can you tell me, do you remember when you first started hearing about fentanyl as a drug?

When I first started hearing about fentanyl as a drug, I was in prison. I was in prison and a lot of people were coming through for the indictments that were happening in upstate New York in the Buffalo area. There were a lot of deaths happening up in the Buffalo area for the fentanyl. So the feds were hitting these drug groups up in Buffalo, New York.

I happened to be with some of them that had already caught state charges. And it was making its way to the prisons. So, Lewis was introduced to fentanyl by this new class of drug dealers, who'd ended up in prison because they'd sold fentanyl laced heroin. Local prosecutors were triumphant that these guys had been locked up.

Now that they'd been incarcerated, it also meant they could now educate people in Lewis's generation of drug dealers about their new product that was doing so well on the street. One of the drug war's many ironies is that drugs are very easy to come by in prison. Smuggled in via the guards, smuggled in via inmates.

According to one federal survey, over 60 percent of sentenced inmates are dependent on drugs. And according to a survey done of prisoners in the UK, heroin in particular is a drug people try for the first time while incarcerated. Have you, have you experienced either heroin or fentanyl? I've done heroin.

I've done heroin in prison. I, I, I can tell you December 25th, 1998, my first time in prison as an adult, my first Christmas, a friend offered it to me and, and I did it. And I did it. I felt uncomfortable at first, got nauseous, stuff like that. But um, after a couple of hours, some coffee, some cigarettes, I wasn't even in prison anymore.

And honestly, in the 18 years that I've done in prison, it was guaranteed to take me out of there. So I was free. So I do heroin to not be in prison. Even though I was physically in it, I was gone. So yeah, I had, I had a love for the, for, for heroin. If there's any drug that I truly loved the feeling it would be heroin.

And as far as fentanyl, I've done it about two times, three times, and I was using Suboxone at the time, in prison. And Suboxone refresher it. Is it it's supposed to make it so you don't get high from opiates, right? Or is it Yeah, it's right. It is a blocker. So right now if, if, if I'm on Suboxone, I can't take heroin, it won't let it, like the drug will still be in my system, but it won't let me experience the feeling.

Fentanyl goes right through that. Right through that. So did you make the choice? Were you like, I'm going to take Fentanyl on purpose. I wanted to experience it. I wanted to know what I was selling. Actually, before I ever sold the bag of it, that night when I got it in my hand, I tried it. And what was it like?

It hit me faster than heroin ever did. I gave my friend some, I don't know if you know what a roll up cigarette is. It's tobacco and then you put it in the rolling paper and you roll it like a joint, right? So, I'm watching out for him while he tries it. I wanted to see. And he sniffed twice, took two bumps.

By the time he rolled the cigarette, his whole voice changed. I thought he was faking it. It takes seconds to roll a cigarette. I thought he was faking it when I looked at him. He was sweating. His face was droopy. I'm like, man, stop playing. I thought he was kidding. And he was stoned out of his mind. He had not done fentanyl.

He was locked up before it started, like me. He was doing some boxing like me. This thing put him on his ass, like, immediately. So I wanted to try it. Cause it was my turn. I took a bump or two by the time I rolled my cigarette. I was already leaning. Immediately. As I tasted it, I got stoned. That fast. For a person that's addicted to heroin, why not love that?

And did it feel like, did it feel like the same as a heroin high, just faster? It was faster. It was faster and I could honestly say it was, it was more intense. A whole lot more intense. In an uncomfortable way. I did it before 12 o'clock at night. And I could honestly say, for the wake up call in the morning, I was still stoned out of my mind.

That whole day was uncomfortable until it came down and then it felt good. And so you said you wanted to try it because you wanted to know what you were selling. Were you selling fentanyl in prison? Yeah. I sold fentanyl in prison. I made a lot of money in prison off of fentanyl. And, and, and I helped my family from the sale of fentanyl.

It's big today in, in prison. You got people taking care of families off of this thing. You first hear about it in prison, it's like a new thing. Were you, like, were you scared of it? Like, I think, like, what was your, what was your feeling about the drug? Besides that it was new. I guess at that point it was worrisome because you always think, you know, who am I going to know that's going to die from that?

My whole neighborhood in the Bronx was flooded with drugs. I have a daughter who lives upstate. That area's flooded with the drug and Buffalo's like right down the street. So, When I was selling it, it kind of freaked me out. That same fentanyl based heroin was killing people in the street. I think at that point, you got the people that don't care, and they're going to give it to you as strong as they can get it.

To the point right now where maybe a year ago, they were cutting the fentanyl with the heroin instead of the other way around. What Lewis is saying is that in Buffalo, in prison, he was seeing the same thing happen that Ben Westhoff, the journalist from Part 1, had been hearing reports of happening nationally.

People who had been addicted to heroin had gotten addicted to fentanyl based heroin and then addicted to just fentanyl. At first they were using the fentanyl to boost up the heroin. Yeah. Then it became where they were cutting the fentanyl with heroin because the heroin wasn't as potent. So what they were doing is they're giving you the taste of it.

And kind of making the fentanyl not as strong by cutting it with the heroin. And is this people, and in this case it's dealers who are selling to addicts who are coming and wanting fentanyl. And they're getting, instead of buying heroin that has fentanyl, they're buying fentanyl that has heroin. Yeah, right now, right now what's happening in the street is they sell straight fentanyl now.

They started selling straight fentanyl, and because people didn't want, like, why even waste time getting anything laced with heroin? It's crazy, right? Laced with heroin, when they could just get fentanyl. Laced with heroin as a phrase is insane. Yeah, yeah, but this is what's going on. Like, you go to some of these streets, like, right now, probably not too far from here, like around the corner, and they're selling caps of fentanyl, or bags of fentanyl.

It's not, it's not even heroin anymore. People are buying fentanyl. The only problem with fentanyl was that once you got a good, um, amount of it in your system for a certain length of time, it doesn't have any legs. So, where I could shoot up a bag of dope and be okay for like an hour or two, fentanyl's gonna take me higher, faster, but it's gone in 15 minutes.

That's why the fentanyl addicts are chasing it so much more.

Very few of the things that other human beings do in life are actually senseless. What can look insane or evil or random is often someone following the rules of a world that are just different than yours. Lewis learned one set of rules growing up as a 13 year old crack dealer in the South Bronx.

Protect your turf with violence. Sell to junkies. Never smoke a cigarette in front of an old lady. Later, as a user himself, he learned a new set of rules. Pursue the greatest high. The more you've lost, the less you have to lose. Lewis was telling me things that I'd already heard Ben Westhoff say, facts that had been reported, but those facts hadn't made sense divorced from the world that had created them.

Now they did. Heroin users avoided fentanyl at first because they'd heard it was deadly. But the ones who survived had pursued fentanyl because it offered a stronger high. And from Lewis, another fact Ben had reported seemed more real to me now. That eventually, overdose deaths from heroin laced fentanyl Didn't serve as a warning to the survivors.

They served as an enticement. And also the fact that it was dropping so many people made more heroin addicts want to gravitate to whoever was selling that bag that was doing this to people so they could get as high as they possibly could. So this is something that I've heard from other people and it sounds like you're saying it's true as well that for, for addicts...

If they hear that someone overdosed off of a drug, that can be kind of an advertisement for that drug. It's definitely an advertisement. Um, the heroin addict, the people that are addicted to opiates, the high that they're looking for is is to be as so far gone as they can be. Because you feel like absolutely no pain.

It's not like with cocaine where, where you're going to tweak and twitch. The opiate is actually going to put you in like a euphoric state where everything that you love, you crave, be it from sexual desires to the love of your parents, the love of your kids, it gives you all of that sensation. And if they see people are passing out from it, they know those people have gone to the highest peak and they want to go there.

And so in that, if, if someone's in that mindset, even an overdose death, that can be, it's like, okay, well that drug got that person very, very high. And then are they making the calculation that they will just be able to use it in a way where they won't die? The people that are that addicted, I don't think it matters if they do die or not because what a way to go, right?

Feeling the best way you could ever possibly feel. It's like heaven on earth before you even get there. It's a risk they take. I think that the scariest part of addiction for somebody outside of looking in or even a person that, that's fighting the addiction that we sacrificed everything for that one thing.

For that one thing, we gave away family, we gave away friends, everything that we worked for, everything that we wanted, things that we hadn't even got yet that we could have achieved and accomplished, we gave it away for that one feeling, even if it was just for a moment. You know, and it's scary that people are willing to die to have that.

Just not to feel life. Some people don't want to live this life and they'd rather hide, cover themselves up in that blanket of the drug. How do you fight the most pleasurable thing you ever had?

After a short break, Lewis gives me an answer to the question that brought us here. An answer based on the logic of the world that he used to inhabit.

Welcome back to the show. So, I want to say, the most common theory I've encountered for fentanyl showing up in non opioid drugs like cocaine is that it probably happens by accident. The image that's often provided is like An inexperienced street level dealer mixing a bunch of drugs on a table and then they just, like, bump a pile.

Or maybe a drug scale used to weigh fentanyl is then used to weigh cocaine without being cleaned. Anything is possible. This show abhors certainty. The problem is, I have not heard first hand accounts of that happening from drug dealers. And when I asked Lewis what he thought, he said, He does not believe this is an accident.

He believes this kind of adulteration is just a new version of an old dealer tactic. Something he said he used to see back in his day as a street level crack dealer. This used to happen back in the day in Harlem, like you could read about this. What people do is... People would lace cocaine with heroin. So now, same difference.

You're going to keep coming for my cocaine because my cocaine is the one that's making you feel the way you want to feel. Because you like it better than anybody else's cocaine. And what it is, you're speedballing and you don't even know it. The people that actually like that feeling, they could only get that feeling from me.

And they don't even know why. Where they think it's my coke, it's that I'm cutting it with a little bit of heroin because I want you... To consistently come to me. So I'm hooking you to dope because once I see that you're just coming to me, coming to me, coming to me, I got you and I didn't hook you with the coke.

I hooked you with the dope, which is what I wanted to begin with. Eventually I'm selling you bags of dope. And the experience that they will have, they won't think, Oh, I just took cocaine and it's really different. They'll think like I took cocaine and it's a little bit better. It's almost like you're describing like.

Um, this is like a, a stupid analogy, but it's like how restaurants use like a lot of salt in the food or something. It's your, put like this, the people that are, that, that do like it, they're gonna stay liking it. You're gonna have the people that maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable and they won't like your coke.

But the ones that do, is gonna take a short amount of time before even they realize that, you know, this is the only coke that's gonna get me there. And then you start selling them dope too. You start selling them dope, too. Some of them are gonna say no for a long time. But then, you know, some of them are not.

I found an article from 1989 describing the same phenomenon that Lewis is talking about. It's from this piece by an LA Times reporter in New York, filing from the front lines of the crack epidemic. The piece is called Smokeable Cocaine Heroin Mixture Seen as Spreading Lethal Addiction. The reporter describes this new innovation among drug dealers.

They're selling users product they claim is crack that's been secretly dusted with heroin. The reporter interviews Robert, a 24 year old in a New York rehab center not very different from the one we're in now. It's just decades in the past. According to the piece, quote, 'You're going to love this, Robert said a dealer told him when he gave him an ordinary looking rock, not telling him about the heroin in it, end quote.

Robert did love it. The reporter talks to a different crack cocaine user named Warner. The piece describes how good this new combination of upper and downer feels to Warner. Quote, normally the high disappears after a few minutes and then he feels awful. Not this time. This rock tasted like medicine, like dope, like heroin.

Instead of crashing, Warner found himself enjoying a gentle descent. Sort of like a parachute, end quote.

This story, combined with Lewis's, they help answer a question that really confused me. Why on earth would a dealer use an opiate as an adulterant in a non opiate drug? Turns out, for some users, it makes it feel better. And, it makes it more addictive. Opiates and opioids offer strong physical withdrawals, which could produce more returning customers.

Lewis said this idea could even apply to something like cannabis. He laid out a scenario of why someone selling cannabis might want to adulterate it with fentanyl. Right now I'm selling weed. I got weed. Everybody's got weed. But now, if I put a little bit of fentanyl in my weed, I'm gonna get you stoned different.

Right? I'm gonna get you stoned different. So what ends up happening is, I'll go to this guy and buy weed, and it's gonna get me high, but it's not gonna get me high like the weed with the fentanyl. I don't know it has fentanyl in it, but I know it makes me feel better. It's a higher, it's a higher high. So I try that other guy, I'll get stoned, but I'm not going to get stoned like this, you're going to come back because you want to get this stoned.

And then what happens is you're going to do it and keep buying the weed from this one guy and you're getting hooked to the fentanyl. And then later on you're a customer that he's going to push it on to. Because he knows what's bringing the people back, especially these kids, is that they're getting hooked to the fentanyl and they don't even know it.

I want to put a caveat here. There's a community of activists and experts online who argue for decriminalization of all sorts of illicit drugs. Honestly, I'm pretty sympathetic to their politics. Some of them have fentanyl showing up in cannabis as just fear mongering. Fear mongering by law enforcement.

Amplified by credulous journalists, some say that fentanyl is not mixed in cannabis because it wouldn't make economic sense for dealers and That also it's chemically unlikely in some cases. Fentanyl degrades in heat more easily than cannabis So lighting up a joint specifically would provide more heat than you'd want for smoking fentanyl But the problem for me is that Lewis is a former drug dealer And he says, in his experience, cannabis does get adulterated.

Two other patients we spoke to at the rehab said the same thing, that dealers are putting fentanyl in cannabis because they want to trick people into using a version of their preferred drug that offers opiate style withdrawal and opiate style addiction. I do not want to suggest that cannabis is a drug that people should generally be afraid of.

Cannabis, compared to a lot of other drugs, is pretty safe. It might make you appreciate jam bands more. But to say categorically that fentanyl would never appear in cannabis feels reckless to me. Dealers interviewed by the New York Times have talked about spraying cannabis with fentanyl, and we found a couple cases from DrugsData.

org where people had asked for their loose cannabis to be tested, and it had come back fentanyl positive. That's the context I have. But I did push Lewis a bit more here on the logic of a choice like this by a dealer, which I do still find strange. Part of what's surprising about that is like, I've never taken opiates, I've taken other drugs.

I always assumed that if I smoked weed laced with fentanyl, I would notice, because fentanyl is such a strong drug. If you put it in small, small quantity, which is still strong, it's really just giving the, the weed a boost, but what it's doing to the body is a little bit different. But what about somebody who's selling like, cocaine, who has a I don't know if you know, and you can look this up, about 70 percent of the overdoses that have been going on, let's say, on Ida County, were cocaine laced fentanyl.

And I'm talking about, this was a few months ago. More than half of the overdoses are coming from that. And why are they doing that? Because people will shine away from just buying the fentanyl. So these people that are still doing the cocaine... You've got drug dealers still willing to do that tactic to, to try to reel these people in.

So they were killing all of these cocaine addicts. They didn't know that they were doing that. I checked Lewis's numbers. He's pretty close. 70 percent of overdose deaths in Oneida County last year involved fentanyl. The majority of those deaths involved cocaine and meth with fentanyl, although fentanyl showed up in other non opiate drugs, too.

In one particular case, seven people overdosed in seven days after smoking a synthetic form of cannabis that had been tainted with fentanyl. When Lewis sees those stories in the newspaper... He doesn't really have questions about them. He sees an old logic that he recognizes. For me, this is as close to a truly satisfying answer as I expect to get on this.

Fentanyl, invented as a hospital painkiller in Belgium, was later formulated in small labs in China. It found a new customer base among opioid addicted Americans. It snuck into the heroin supply first, then heroin users had begun to ask for it by name. And now, it adulterates many other drugs in the illicit market.

These days, fentanyl adulteration, at least in some cases, is an intentional choice by drug dealers who are willing to risk some customers lives in order to create new opioid users. Obviously, of course, this is an underground economy. No one sees all of it. We will never know for sure if any given case is an accident or if it's greed.

But to Lewis, who once sold the kinds of drugs people die from, or ruin their lives for, this new story is really an old one. The ugliness of the crack era happening again. Except everywhere this time, not just in the cities. When crack came, it was a totally big change. Now, we're going back to the 60s and 50s with the heroin, except with these new designer drugs, with the mentality of the 1986 crack era.

It's crazy. Do you see fentanyl as like a drug of this era? Like a highly deadly drug that you can cut into lots of other stuff? Like a drug that exemplifies, even among people who may have done things that hurt other people, like a drug that exists in a world where... where people care much less about other people than they might have.

I think fentanyl itself is, is, is a perfect example of the way the street has become. The example of how far down the rabbit hole even criminals have gone, addiction has become. There's no consciousness to it at all. Not to the person selling it, not to the person doing it. And it's not a white thing, it's not a black thing, it's not a Latino thing.

It's just a thing now. Doesn't matter the neighborhood. Doesn't matter none of that. It's the new wave. Get as high as you can, as fast as you can, and, and, and to hell with everybody else. And it's sad right now. Walk out the building, make a right, you're gonna see people twisted out of their mind to the left, all for that K2.

And they lacing that with fentanyl too. The fake weed, they lacing that with fentanyl. Because, I mean, like, why not? Why not? I won't even buy a loose cigarette in the store today. Really? No, I won't. I won't. I won't do it. I'd rather not smoke, or, or I'll get a smoke from a friend. I, I cannot buy a loose cigarette.

Cause you're worried they would lace a loose cigarette, like a bodega guy would lace a loose cigarette. Like, why not? Why not? It's already open pack. It's already illegal. Half of these places are surrounded by drugs. Like, why not? It's not like I ain't sell drugs in these stores, it's not like some of these people didn't supply me in one way or another, like so why not?

It's just another hustle, why not get in on it? Think about it. Back in the day you used to dip the cigarettes in the, in the, the angel dust. Why not do it to the Fentanyl and sell it like that for the people that want to smoke it? Let me get a 10 cigarette. It's a Fentanyl stick, you know what I mean?

Lewis's lifetime as a drug dealer has left him with an outlook of earned paranoia. An understanding that there are people in this world who might poison you to make a buck. And that those people might be hard for any of us to recognize. But to Lewis, today, what's most important is turning the page. When we met him, it was March.

He'd been sober seven months and two weeks. That's what he was focusing on. Recovery. On not being the person he used to be. A big part of my life, I believe, is beginning now. Because I can honestly say for the first time, it's not just about not getting high, it's about changing the mentality that, that always goes back to getting high.

My focus right now for when I leave here is to try to reach as many kids as possible. And like, I don't lie to them. Even to the kids up here, I don't lie to them. If my story's ugly, I'm going to tell them how ugly it is. I've got three daughters, just like I've had to tell my daughters, you don't want to be with a man like me.

You don't want to get caught up with somebody with the mentality that I have. And this was while I was still thinking those ways because I didn't want a man like me for my daughter. And that's sad that I couldn't be anything but a bad example with the hopes that they don't follow me. So, if, if I could take that bad example and give it to these kids and let them know it was coming, because I've been there, then I could balance out some of the, the negative that I've done through my life.

What do I want right now for my life? I want to make it worth something and the only way I could do that is to stay clean and help people stay away from my tracks. With that, I'm finished. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, sir. I appreciate you guys. Please, man, put that out there. People need to hear this.

A few months after we talked to Lewis, we reached out again to run him through this story, prior to publication. The people at his rehab, Odyssey House, told us that he completed treatment shortly after we'd first spoken to him. He's out of rehab and back in the world now, out here with the rest of us.

That's our show this week, but stick around after the break for some resources on how to stay safe.

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Welcome back to the show. So we mentioned this last week, but in case people are listening to this episode as its own discreet thing, here's some resources. If you use illicit drugs, or if your friends do, you should go to dancesafe. org. You go to their website, you can buy fentanyl test strips. We have put a link to both the site and a video for how to use these strips in our newsletter, but it's very easy.

You take a small amount of the substance you want to test, you dilute it in water, you dip the strip, and then you look for a line, like a COVID test. The other website we mentioned last week, which I will reiterate, is DrugsData. org. Um, this is like an offshoot of Arrowid, if you're familiar with that website, but people send in their illicit drugs, the organization tests them, and then they say what's in the drugs.

And what's interesting about this website is you can use it to sort of see what is generally happening in the illicit market, which is usually an ocean of question marks. So, looking today, I see that in Washington, A lot of people are testing MDMA and it looks like it's actually MDMA. So those are two websites you can check out.

Also, Odyssey House, the rehab that connected us to Lewis, their website is odysseyhousenyc. org. They do inpatient rehab, medication assistant treatment, harm reduction services, and outpatient services. Their admissions hotline is 866 888 7880. And as always, if you have a question for us, you can leave a comment on the newsletter at pjvote.

com or email me directly at pjvote85 at gmail. com. We are not publishing an episode next week, but we will be back the week after. As always, you can find our schedule for the year on the About page of our newsletter. pjvote. com.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me and Shruthi Panamaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme and sound design by Armin Bazarian. Fact checking by Sean Merchant. Our executive producers at Odyssey are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Thank you to the folks at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And thanks to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Klauser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Orin Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC.

Special thanks to Isabel, Jay, and Kenny from Odyssey House, and a big thank you to reporter Sarah Maslin Neer, her fentanyl reporting is excellent, we will have some links in the newsletter, and also thanks to Zach Siegel, he has a newsletter about the drug war called Substance that's worth checking out, he also has a totally different theory about why fentanyl is adulterated into drugs like cocaine, and you can read about it on his newsletter.

Follow and listen to Search Engine with me, PJ Vogt. Now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We will see you in two weeks.

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