seems to be extracting the drug from pharmaceutical products such as transdermal patches and that this is also the case in Germany. While Europe’s problem with fentanyl is smaller than North America’s, a sharp uptick in deaths indicates the crisis may also be spreading to the United Kingdom, which according to one survey buys more fentanyl from the Dark Web than any other European country.
Even aside from fentanyl, fentanyl analogues have triggered a crisis in some countries. In 2016, Sweden suffered forty-three deaths associated with acrylfentanyl, an analogue discussed in scientific literature during the 1980s but unknown in Sweden until it started killing people. In 2017 another analogue, cyclopropylfentanyl, caused more than seventy deaths there. Now, because of the fentanyl analogues, fentanyls as a class have displaced heroin as the number-one killer drug in the country. The analogues there are purchased almost entirely over the Internet, from China.
Other European and Eastern European countries are also starting to see fentanyls from China, but that’s a fairly recent development. Until recent years, European fentanyl was procured locally—stolen from pharmacies, for example, or harvested from patches in hospital waste—or received from Russia and its Eastern bloc neighbors.
Russia itself imports vast quantities of ecstasy and synthetic cannabinoids from China, and the country has widespread public-health problems with drugs including heroin and “bath salts.” Russia also harbors a huge psychonaut community, whose members create new drugs and discuss them on Internet message boards. It’s difficult to gauge whether Russia suffers from widespread fentanyl addiction, because its data reporting is very poor. The country has undoubtedly been producing the synthetic drug for a long time, however, both legally and illegally. Before the dissolution of the USSR, it was producing fentanyl for its army. “It was included as a painkiller in the emergency kits for Soviet Union soldiers,” said Roumen Sedefov of the European Monitoring Centre For Drugs and Drug Addiction. “After the Soviet Union collapse, we think there may have been huge stockpiles of fentanyl, in Lithuania and other countries, and a lot of it was diverted into Europe and sold on the illicit market. This may have fueled, partly, the epidemic here in Europe.” William Leonard Pickard, a famed LSD chemist now serving a life sentence for conspiring to manufacture and distribute LSD, studied the Russian fentanyl epidemic in the 1990s while a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He uncovered Mafia-run laboratories in Azerbaijan, where chemists who were winners of the Russian chemistry olympiad synthesized fentanyls including 3-methylfentanyl. They were imprisoned, but he feared that other out-of-work chemists formerly employed by the Soviet Union could spread fentanyl far beyond the country’s borders.
The fentanyl analogue 3-methylfentanyl has never been used as a medical drug. There is no legitimate need for anyone to have it, with the exception of official forensic labs in places like Estonia, where tiny quantities are needed to verify the types of street fentanyl that are killing people. Still, numerous Chinese labs make it for illicit use.
Though 3-methylfentanyl has likely killed thousands of people, its inventor, Thomas Riley, who died in 2005, appears to have been unaware of the fallout. His widow, Phyllis Riley, doesn’t believe he knew the drug was used illicitly. One of his former colleagues, retired University of Mississippi pharmacology professor Marvin Wilson, was Riley’s coauthor, along with Danny B. Hale, of a 1973 paper about 3-methylfentanyl published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Science. Wilson acknowledged, to me, that drug peddlers could have learned about 3-methylfentanyl from their paper. “Chemists of the [DEA] believe that any competent chemist could make the substance after reading Dr. Riley’s description in the chemical literature,” concurred a 1980 New York Times article on the subject. Wilson recalled they weren’t much concerned with its abuse potential. “Because it was so potent, a lot of us at the time thought that it probably won’t get into the abuse channels, because it would be so potentially dangerous, and small changes in the dose could have dramatic effects on the body. We weren’t thinking of it as a new heroin.”
The conflict between legitimate medical science and illicit drug chemistry has come to the forefront as NPS have spread. Not just fentanyls, but deadly hallucinogens, synthetic cannabinoids, fake ecstasy, and other stimulants have all gotten their starts in scientific labs. Academics say nothing can stop legitimate scientific creations from crossing over into the realm of abuse—without stifling science. Nonetheless, the trend has caused some outraged family members of overdose victims to demand that the university-sanctioned creators of these drugs be held accountable.
“We as scientists just haven’t been able to differentiate the receptors that lead to abuse from those that are associated with the analgesic,” Wilson laments. “And that’s a conundrum. Scientists come up with knowledge, and people choose to use that knowledge in different ways. Some beneficial, and some not so beneficial. But to not continue the scientific endeavor, certainly is not a good option for mankind either.”
Marvin Wilson and his colleagues were not alone in underestimating the potential popularity of fentanyl. Experts ranging from health-care professionals to top scientists knew how powerful and addictive fentanyl was, and yet very few of them expected it to seize hold in the general population. The underestimation of fentanyl’s potential extended to the DEA, even as recently as 2015. That year the agency’s National Drug Threat Assessment Summary, which focuses on drug abuse trends, read: “Fentanyl will remain a threat while the current clandestine production continues; however, it is unlikely to assume a significant portion of the opioid market. Fentanyl’s short-lasting high, coupled with its high mortality rate, renders it unappealing to many opioid users who prefer the longer-lasting high that heroin offers and who wish to avoid the increased danger from fentanyl.”
One year later, fentanyl had shot past heroin and was killing more Americans annually than any other drug in American history. And the fentanyl analogues, which are being developed and marketed at a rapid clip, threaten to make the problem worse. Seventeen analogues were reported to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime between 2012 and 2016, some of which were developed from information found in scientific papers published thirty or forty years ago. These fentanyls—including ocfentanil, furanylfentanyl, acetylfentanyl, and butyrfentanyl—had never been made into marketable drugs. They could have existed only on paper, but at a time when old research is more accessible than ever before, these chemicals have roared to life.
We are now living in pharmacology professor Gary Henderson’s dystopian future, which he described in his 1988 paper “Designer Drugs: Past History and Future Prospects.” Just as Henderson predicted, the production of illicit fentanyl has become an international business. Like most NPS, the majority of illicit fentanyl is made in Chinese drug laboratories. It’s then sold over the Dark Web to individual dealers or shipped to Mexican drug cartels, who press it into counterfeit pills, cut it into heroin, coke, or meth, or package it up as powder and bring it into the United States.
What Henderson didn’t predict is that many fentanyl users don’t even realize they are taking it. Thinking they are buying another drug, they instead receive a product cut with fentanyl. They don’t know they have put a potentially lethal drug into their system until it’s too late. Today, in many places, little heroin can be found that hasn’t been cut with fentanyl. “There are very few people that just make pure heroin nowadays, because of the quality of ‘El Diabolito,’ ” a Sinaloa trafficker told Fusion, referencing fentanyl.
That dealers would kill off their own clients may seem counterintuitive.
“It brings more business,” said Detective Ricardo Franklin, of the St. Louis County Police Department’s Bureau of Drug Enforcement. “Sure, it kills more people, but from a user standpoint, they’re not thinking about the death. When they hear someone OD’d, they think it must be an amazing high. A friend who will tell a friend who will tell a friend, and in the end it’s promotion.”
“If addicts find something that killed somebody, they flock to it,” said Jack Sanders, a former fentanyl dealer from St. Louis. “They want the strongest product possible. Most people, they
