of young fans. And Los Angeles was the center of its universe. EDM was being celebrated in the national media as a big neon party that never ended.
And then I heard about the deaths.
In 2010, fifteen-year-old Sasha Rodriguez fatally overdosed at Electric Daisy Carnival at the LA Coliseum, reportedly from ecstasy. Local politicians revolted, and the event was forced to relocate to Las Vegas. A Plymouth State University student named Brittany Flannigan overdosed and died in late August 2013 after attending a Boston EDM concert featuring the popular DJ Zedd, and just days later a University of Virginia student named Mary “Shelley” Goldsmith passed away as well. Both were nineteen, and reports said they had taken “Molly.”
At the time, many believed Molly was pure MDMA, the drug found in ecstasy, also known as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. But this didn’t seem right. The Molly users I witnessed dipped their fingers into a plastic bag of white powder and then licked it off, repeating the process every ten minutes or so. Some would snort it. This was different from my heyday on the rave scene. Back then, the ravers I knew simply took a pill and would be happily rolling for the whole night.
With mega-raves came increasing numbers of casualties. At New York’s Electric Zoo over Labor Day weekend in 2013, a twenty-year-old University of New Hampshire student named Olivia Rotondo and a twenty-three-year-old recent graduate of Syracuse University named Jeffrey Russ both collapsed and died, reportedly after taking Molly. At the Hard Summer festival in August 2015, outside Los Angeles, two young women fatally overdosed and forty-nine people had to be taken to emergency rooms. The event sparked a Los Angeles Times article quoting emergency-room doctors as saying that raves on LA-county-owned property should be banned, at least temporarily. “If the county wants to make money while people are dying and medically compromised,” said Dr. Philip Fagan Jr., emergency department director at Los Angeles’s Good Samaritan Hospital, “they should come out and say it.”
These weren’t just freak accidents. The more I covered the EDM scene, the more I realized how widespread the fatalities were. Six people overdosed and died at a single EDM festival in Malaysia in 2014, while just about every major US EDM concert—including Electric Daisy Carnival, Nocturnal Wonderland, Together as One, Monster Massive, Coachella, Ultra, and Electric Forest—saw festival-goers die from drug use. No statistics were available about the number of deaths at EDM festivals. But no one could dispute a disturbing fact: the number was growing.
Officials blamed ecstasy—a word many used synonymously with Molly—but that contradicts the relatively benign nature of the chemical. “You don’t see many ecstasy overdose deaths,” confirmed Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe, a Denver-based organization dedicated to harm reduction at music festivals and other events. He estimates that MDMA deaths per year in the United States number around twenty—not just kids at raves, but everyone—which is a tiny fraction of total drug deaths. Further, large numbers of the MDMA deaths weren’t brought about because users’ dosages were too high, he adds, but because they suffered from heatstroke, from dancing continuously without drinking water or wearing themselves out beneath the hot sun.
Molly, however, is not ecstasy as it has been known. “Molly means, like, anything now,” a Dallas toxicologist named Ashley Haynes warned. It might contain a small amount of MDMA but most likely contains a hodgepodge of bizarre drugs with complicated chemical names users have never heard of, including so-called “bath salts.” It turns out, she added, that there are hundreds of these new drugs. Almost every traditional drug—be it marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, or heroin—is being replaced by new, sinister versions made in laboratories.
Further, as I discovered, they were being distributed in new ways, like the Dark Web, leading to an entirely upended drug landscape that nobody seemed to understand—not the parents of children who had lost their lives, not first responders, not cops, and certainly not politicians. The people consuming many of these bastardized types of speed, psychedelics, and other substances are not traditional hard-drug users. They are high school kids, college students, and recreational enthusiasts best described as drug nerds. Some know what they are doing, using sophisticated Internet forums to expand their minds and explore intellectual pursuits. A great many, however, have no idea just how potent and dangerous these new drugs can be.
NPS are hard to spot, as they can come as powders, crystals, pills, or liquids, resembling traditional drugs, or even sprayed onto dried sage to be smoked like marijuana. Sometimes they are even professionally packaged and sold in stores, mislabeled as “bath salts” or “potpourri.”
These new drugs aren’t just confounding users. In recent years, law enforcement agencies have seized exponentially larger quantities of NPS, but this is a drop in the bucket. By the time police get wise to these chemicals, rogue manufacturers have already moved on to new formulas, because when it comes to creating synthetic drugs, the mathematical possibilities are endless. By varying a molecule just slightly, rogue chemists can come up with a whole new drug, one that is still legal because it hasn’t yet been scheduled (controlled and restricted). After the chemicals sold as K2 and Spice were banned, for example, a whole new set of fake marijuana blends immediately popped up in their place.
“Over the past several years, the DEA has identified hundreds of designer drugs from at least eight different drug classes,” DEA special agent Elaine Cesare observed. “There are a seemingly infinite number of possible new chemical compounds that are on the horizon.”
Many law enforcement officers use the same expression when describing their attempts to stop these drugs: a game of whack-a-mole. Whenever one new drug is contained, another simply pops up in its place. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has called the synthetics industry “hydra-headed.” “When you control one derivative of fentanyl, another derivative comes out, which is not on the control list. Criminals are always one step ahead of law enforcement,” said Tun Nay Soe, of the UNODC.
This book is the result of my interviews with 160 people, visits to drug sites and laboratories all over the world, and research drawn from hundreds of source materials. In some cases, often to preserve their own safety, subjects have requested I use pseudonyms; they are identified as such in the text.
While reporting the story of NPS, I met people suffering from fentanyl and other drug addictions, some destitute and living on the streets, others functioning in well-paid jobs. I spent time with psychonauts, thrill seekers who try brand-new drugs that have never been taken before. I learned how these chemicals are marketed and sold, from the factories to the streets to the search engine. I spent months on every step of the drug-distribution ladder, with everyone from low-level dealers to big-time traffickers, from the industrial manufacturers to the inventors of the drugs themselves. I went back over the details of my close friend Michael “Helias” Schafermeyer’s death in Baltimore, from fentanyl combined with alcohol, in 2010—long before I knew what fentanyl was.
I consulted politicians, police, DEA agents, and international drug policy makers, who would like to put these traffickers away forever; and I spoke with counselors, doctors, activists, and policy wonks, some of whom believe these drugs should be legal. I corresponded with two infamous, now-imprisoned LSD kingpins who worked together out of an abandoned missile silo in Kansas; the demise of their operation in 2000 may have inadvertently fueled the rise of a new hallucinogen whose effects are far worse than LSD.
I learned how a brilliant Belgian chemist created a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company from scratch but in the process unleashed a horror like nothing ever seen before. I prowled dangerous St. Louis streets with an armed former fentanyl dealer to understand how the epidemic started, tracing the history to Mexican cartel affiliates who traveled north to spread what had originated in China into inner cities all over the United States.
Finally, I infiltrated a pair of Chinese drug operations, one a sophisticated laboratory operation distilling outsize quantities of the world’s most dangerous
