he was hooked on heroin and had already smoked some by the time Henke arrived, in addition to drinking and dropping acid. Still, Henke seemed to be even more intoxicated than his friend, and he threw up immediately upon walking in the door.
Henke was clearly affected, but this didn’t especially faze Gerszewski. “He seemed high, but he didn’t seem in bad shape,” he said. “Me and him had seen each other all through high school in very bad states—fucked up, throwing up.”
They dipped into the fentanyl Henke had bought from Jensen, and powered up the Xbox to play a mixed martial arts video game. A few other people Gerszewski knew were there too, but they left at some point, leaving the two friends alone with their drugs. As midnight approached, Henke’s energy flagged. In the midst of their game, Gerszewski noticed that Henke’s avatar had stopped moving. His friend looked like he was nodding off.
Henke insisted he was fine. They continued playing until, again, Henke’s avatar stopped moving. “I’m just a little tired,” Henke said.
When his character froze again, Gerszewski saw that Henke’s eyes were shut and he was growing pale. He tapped him, and then nudged him, getting no response. Gerszewski feared Henke had overdosed, but was so high himself that he had a hard time reading the situation. Was this a dream? Was Henke faking it? He grabbed and shook him.
Now realizing the depth of the problem, Gerszewski made a mistake. Instead of immediately calling 911, he called Schwandt, who came over and attempted CPR. When an ambulance finally arrived, it was too late.
Just after midnight, Bailey Henke was pronounced dead. About three hours later a police officer knocked on his parents’ door in Minot. He told them the bad news, but Laura and Jason Henke couldn’t get to Grand Forks until the next evening to begin the mourning process. Another big snowstorm had closed down the highway.
On January 22, 2015, police raided Brandon Hubbard and Channing Lacey’s Portland apartment, seizing all of the drugs inside. Bailey Henke’s death had triggered what became the widest-ranging fentanyl investigation in history. Known as Operation Denial, it’s an international endeavor begun in 2015 and still ongoing, involving agencies from the local Grand Forks police department to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the US DEA working in China. It has tracked down people from every step in the fentanyl supply chain that killed Henke, and charged thirty-two.
These include Ryan Jensen, who in 2016 received a prison sentence of twenty years for charges including drug distribution resulting in death; Brandon Hubbard, who that year received life in prison; and Daniel Vivas Ceron, who pled guilty to charges including importing controlled substances resulting in death, and was awaiting sentencing at the time this book went to print. Investigators believe Hubbard earned millions from his Dark Web sales of fentanyl and heroin, and in his plea deal he took responsibility for the deaths of Bailey Henke and another Grand Forks teenager, nineteen-year-old Evan Poitra, who died in July 2014. Others on the periphery of the wide-ranging case were convicted as well, including Kain Schwandt, who spent about a year and a half behind bars, for conspiracy to possess illicit drugs with intent to distribute, and Channing Lacey, who snuck in fentanyl when she went to jail and distributed it there, causing a fatal overdose. She received eleven years for drug distribution resulting in death. For its efforts, in November 2018, Operation Denial received special recognition from the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Yet for all of Operation Denial’s convictions, it has not been able to snag the person at the very top of the drug pyramid, Jian Zhang, the Chinese man accused of manufacturing and selling the fentanyl that killed Henke and others. Zhang is a chemical trader born in 1978 and operating out of the Eastern China city of Qingdao. His company claims to make benign food additives, including spices and soy products, but in April, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to Fargo to unseal an indictment against Zhang, accusing him of leading a drug ring that sold fentanyl throughout the United States. The indictment listed eleven states, including North Dakota and Oregon.
Zhang has been pursued with the full weight of not just the US Department of Justice but also the Treasury, which charged him as a kingpin under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, blocking his US financial assets and those of his company, Zaron Bio-Tech (Asia) Limited. “Combating the flow of fentanyl into the United States is a top priority of this administration,” Sigal Mandelker, under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement. “This action will disrupt the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into the United States.”
Yet the United States couldn’t jail Jian Zhang, because China refused to turn him over. The country has no extradition treaty with the United States, and China does not believe Zhang to be a criminal. Zhang was briefly detained in China, but then released without being charged, and Yu Haibin, director of precursor chemical control at China’s Narcotics Control Commission, said they did not have “solid evidence” that he broke Chinese law. Further, Chinese officials are quick to note, most NPS were invented in labs in Europe and the United States. And this isn’t just a problem of production—it’s one of consumption. China believes America needs to control its drug problem.
Considering that fentanyl has been banned (except for medical use) in China for decades, it’s unclear why China could not, or simply did not, prosecute Zhang. But there’s an even bigger problem. Many of the other NPS killing Americans, Europeans, and others are still 100 percent legal in China, even while banned in the West. In recent years, some of the biggest new drug kingpins can’t be successfully prosecuted. The Pablo Escobars of today are coming out of China, and they don’t have to worry about being imprisoned by their government. They can often operate free and in the clear, within the boundaries of their country’s own laws. Whenever a deadly new drug is made illegal in China, manufacturers simply tweak its chemical structure and start producing a new drug that is still legal. Many fentanyl analogues and synthetic cannabinoids have been made this way. Though Chinese authorities have pledged to crack down—and in May, 2019, banned all fentanyl analogues—their efforts so far have barely dented the country’s clandestine international trade.
The rise of fentanyl and NPS happened quickly. When I started investigating these new drugs in 2013, fentanyl wasn’t on the public radar at all. I had never heard of it. In fact, I only came to this story by accident.
Living in Los Angeles at the time, as the music editor at LA Weekly, I was investigating why so many people were dying at raves. Electronic dance music (EDM) had recently exploded in popularity, and with its rise came increasing deaths, mostly young kids experimenting with ecstasy.
I wasn’t new to the scene. In the late 1990s I partied in abandoned San Francisco warehouses and deserted beach spots as part of the first wave of American electronic dance music—people then called it electronica. These events were usually populated only by those who had garnered a personal invitation from a friend of the organizer; to get directions one had to call a secret phone line. On the scene, maybe a few dozen people would dance to cutting-edge, drum-machine-driven beats. The drugs, ecstasy and LSD, made participants especially appreciate exotic rhythms. These ravers and club kids wore fluorescent colors and giant goggles and chewed on pacifiers or breathed Vicks VapoRub beneath surgical masks to enhance the sensation of ecstasy.
I, along with most Americans, dropped out of the scene by the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. EDM’s popularity continued unabated in Europe, while in the United States many stars saw their music fall off the charts. But by the 2010s electronic dance music was back and bigger than ever, drawing tens of thousands of neon-clad kids to raves. The new raves couldn’t have been more different from the underground parties I had attended. No longer secret affairs featuring obscure sounds, today’s EDM events feature celebrity DJs spinning in mammoth venues such as stadiums and racetracks. Electric Daisy Carnival, now held every spring in Las Vegas, draws some four hundred thousand attendees. In the music industry, which had been decimated by audio-sharing services and still hadn’t
