taken into custody was Martier’s partner, a drug cook named George Marquardt. No ordinary illicit chemist, Marquardt was an oddly philosophical, hyperintelligent chemistry prodigy. A retired DEA agent later called him “the very best illicit chemist in the history of American drugmaking.”
As a child Marquardt had been fascinated by “an anti-drug film in which a mouse on LSD chased a cat.” Before he was old enough to drive, he was making heroin with a friend, and after doing research for the University of Wisconsin (from which he pilfered lab equipment) he pretended to be a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, falsely adding the claim to his CV in an attempt to trick a Milwaukee college into accepting him as a physics lecturer. The ruse succeeded.
Marquardt single-handedly fashioned his own mass spectrometer, a complicated scientific instrument used to identify chemicals, and became a drug mercenary for hire, eschewing the academic world because it didn’t pay enough. But he was genuinely fascinated with the magic of chemistry and had a selfless streak as well. At one point, he said, he synthesized clandestine AZT for people with AIDS. Marquardt made his name, however, with hard drugs, venturing further and further into a dangerous underworld, emboldened by a belief—similar to one held by Walter White of the series Breaking Bad—that drug kingpins wouldn’t kill him because he made a superior product. He first learned about fentanyl in 1978, while doing jail time after being busted at his Oklahoma meth lab. Upon his release he began producing fentanyl, but not before doing his homework. “I read the forensic science literature religiously,” he said. “I read publications like Police Science Abstracts. Surveyed all the appearances of fentanyl everywhere that I could find out from the literature. And gave careful thought to what these people had done wrong.” He reported spending more than a week at a time cooking up batches, and he sought to make different varieties of fentanyl so his products would appear to come from different labs and thus confuse the authorities.
The DEA, however, believed it could trace the 126 Northeastern deaths back to Marquardt and Martier’s lab, and Marquardt was charged with distributing and manufacturing fentanyl. He immediately confessed to his crimes. “I just don’t bother with the lies,” he said. “When the game’s over, it’s just over. If you can’t deal with the consequences of these things, you should have carried a lunch bucket.” In the end, Marquardt’s products were thought to have killed more people than initially suspected—perhaps two hundred or even three hundred. He served twenty-two years in prison and was released in 2015.
Marquardt now swears he is done with fentanyl, but he has little remorse. “I don’t feel like I’m supplying a product to an innocent or naïve population,” he said. “I attach no blame to them. They are what they are. I am what I am. We’re both criminals.”
The moral discussion of accountability becomes more complicated when one considers legitimate university scientists who, like Marquardt, were also making fentanyls. They sought to patent new chemicals that would benefit the study of medicine and, ultimately, people suffering from pain. For this reason, most people would give them the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that they were often motivated by financial gain as well—and that such scientists sometimes unwittingly paved the way for rogue chemists to exploit their work.
A fentanyl analogue called 3-methylfentanyl, patented by a University of Mississippi professor of medicinal chemistry named Thomas Riley, provides a case in point. Riley developed it from Paul Janssen’s original fentanyl, and hoped that 3-methylfentanyl might perhaps maintain fentanyl’s potent analgesic (or pain-reducing) qualities, without sharing its dangerous attributes, and catch on as a medical product. In 1973, he and two other collaborators published a paper about their studies of 3-methylfentanyl on rats, but the results were not what Riley hoped. It was never commercially marketed, and he never made any money off it.
With addicted users, however, 3-methylfentanyl was a huge hit. In the late 1980s it killed eighteen people in western Pennsylvania. Predating Tango and Cash, this was the first major case of fentanyl-related deaths since the California overdoses earlier in the decade.
More than a decade later, 3-methylfentanyl was at the center of an armed hostage crisis in Moscow. On October 23, 2002, a huge crowd had gathered in a converted ball-bearing factory for the performance of Nord-Ost (Northeast), a musical celebrating Russian heritage that was the most expensive production of its kind in the country’s history. The show came to an abrupt halt when dozens of Chechen rebels seized control of the facility, taking about eight hundred attendees hostage and threatening to kill them if the Chechen war with Russia wasn’t immediately ended. The standoff lasted for several days, and on October 26 Russian security police pumped a gray aerosol gas into the building, intending to knock out the hijackers before forcing their way in. The guerillas were killed, but so were about 120 of the hostages, who were already weakened by days without food or water. Some died en route to the hospital.
Though authorities initially declined to say what chemical agent had been used, the Russian health minister and a Russian newspaper later identified it as 3-methylfentanyl. Subsequent analysis of survivors’ clothing indicates it was possibly a chemical cocktail containing numerous drugs, including carfentanil.
Russia claimed that the gas used was nonlethal and intended to simply put both the rebels and the civilians to sleep. Though some praised the Russian effort for saving the majority of the hostages, many international observers criticized it as a type of chemical warfare that not only violated international treaties but also was based on foolhardy science.
“There is no way known to medical science that can put a large number of people to sleep without killing a sizable percentage of them,” said Harvard biology professor Matt Meselson. “In medicine you are dealing with one patient. You can see when he is asleep and, assuming your hand isn’t shaking too badly on the valve, you probably won’t kill him. But the military objective is different. You have to put 100 percent of the people to sleep—not 50 percent, not 70 percent—and you have to put them to sleep fast. There isn’t any way to do that effectively and safely.” Analysts continue to worry that fentanyls could be used in large-scale attacks, particularly by terrorists, considering that a tiny amount can do such damage. In January, 2019, Massachusetts senator Ed Markey wrote letters to the State and Defense Departments, warning of the possibility of such an attack on Americans. “To my knowledge, no such strategy exists at present for addressing the threat fentanyl poses,” he wrote.
In 1988, an international treaty scheduled 3-methylfentanyl—effectively outlawing it in much of the world—but by the early 2000s it had begun catching on as a street drug in Eastern and Northern European countries such as Estonia. The small former Soviet satellite, known for its brisk economic growth, already had a large heroin problem, but the heroin supply from Afghanistan was squeezed after the Taliban banned opium poppy farming in 2000. Fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl began to take off, likely entering the country from Russia, which it borders. Over the next decade a thousand or more Estonians died from fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl overdose, a startling number for a country of only 1.3 million.
Though the heroin supply has reemerged, the destruction from fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl continues in Estonia. “The dealers realize it’s easier to traffic and package fentanyl than heroin . . . and so they strictly control the market in favor of fentanyl. Even though drug users themselves say they would prefer heroin, it’s simply not allowed [by dealers] in Estonian markets,” observed Aljona Kurbatova, head of the Infectious Diseases and Drug Abuse Prevention Department at Estonia’s National Institute for Health Development.
A 2016 study showed Estonia to have the highest increase in drug-overdose deaths in the world, and the entrenchment of fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl there serves as a portentous warning for number two: the United States. Despite hopes that the crisis has peaked, experts believe fentanyl and its analogues could be just picking up speed. Fentanyl is also threatening to become an epidemic in other countries. Australia saw 232 deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl in 2017, and the number is believed to
