Crooked chemists and the Fentanyl minefield

In an unremarkable warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai, music journalist Ben Westhoff claims Chinese chemists fill orders off the internet for a synthetic opioid called Fentanyl - it's so lethal, that just 2 milligrams can kill you.

He spent four years immersed in the shadowy world of designer drugs, becoming the first reporter to get an inside  look at a Chinese laboratory where, he claims, this powerful drug has been made to order.

His journey is recounted in his book, Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating The Deadliest Wave Of The Opioid Epidemic.

It’s important to note that fentanyl isn’t always deadly, when used responsibly it’s a vital drug and pain reliever. For example, it can be given to women during childbirth for epidurals and men are also sometimes given fentanyl for colonoscopies.

“When we hear about the fentanyl that's killing people, that's different. That's not usually fentanyl stolen from hospitals or pharmacies. That's usually the illicit fentanyl, the illegal fentanyl, that's made in Chinese laboratories,” Westhoff told Afternoons.

The synthetic fentanyl that’s made in labs is part of a whole new crop of chemicals of drug variations – called novel psychoactive substances (NPS) - that people hadn’t heard of until recently, he says.

“They often have these unpronounceable names, but they're replacements for known drugs. And so you have the new synthetic heroin, which is fentanyl, you have new versions of cocaine, of meth, of LSD.”

And synthetic cannabis, too, is also being made in those labs, he says. Although it sounds similar to regular marijuana, he says they’re not alike in the substance - with the synthetic version being a chemical sprayed onto dried plant matter – nor the effects.

Westhoff says the synthetic cannabis being made in labs now is also different to what was developed by Kiwi chemist Matt Bowden, who sold then-legal highs as an alternative to black market drugs, before moving into the production of synthetic cannabis in 2011. 

“And this wasn't again like the synthetic cannabis that's killing people. It wasn't too strong. It was regulated. It was safe. And he took his case all the way to the New Zealand government who agreed to legalise all of this synthetic cannabis and party drugs.”

It was unprecedented, with Westhoff describing it as the most wide-ranging drug legalisation in history. However, about a year later the drugs were made illegal again.

• Read more: Synthetic cannabis: The killer high

Banning NPS is problematic, because rogue chemists are always prepared to tweak the chemical formula that would make it fall out of the ranges of whatever newly implemented legislation comes in, Westhoff says.

“So now you've got something that still acts like the drug - it still gets people high in the same way, and it's still dangerous - but now it's technically legal. And the chemists can just keep doing that over and over and over.”

America’s opioid epidemic

In the United States, Westhoff says many doctors were over-prescribing opioid pain killers and that some Americans may have unwittingly become addicted to the substance.

“Doctors overprescribed them because the pharmaceutical companies put out a sort of wrong information campaign, they said that these drugs like Oxycontin were not really addictive, and that people weren't going to have any problems with them.

“When, in fact, their own research showed that these drugs like Oxycontin were much more addictive than they ever let on.”

More recently the country has started to change the laws and rules about prescribing these powerful drugs, he says.

He describes fentanyl as being worse than crack was in the 1980s, or meth in the early 2000s, and more damaging than heroin and Oxycodone in the 2010s. In 2017 alone, more than 70,200 Americans died from drug overdoses, including illicit drugs and prescription opioids.

“The number of deaths from fentanyl is actually going up every year. And it's not just the US, it's Canada, it's the UK, places like Australia even,” he says.

America’s opioid epidemic can be thought of in three waves, he says, the first being prescription pills like Oxycontin.

“We had a huge problem and still do with doctors over prescribing these opioids. And so when people's prescriptions run out, they often turn to street heroin.”

And heroin thus became the second wave, he says, but now it’s almost impossible to find ‘pure’ heroin because fentanyl is mixed into it, making it the third wave of the opioid epidemic.

The rogue chemist labs

When the journalist noticed an uptick in deaths at raves, he started a quest to understand the drug which took him all the way to China.

He says in almost every rave he went to, someone died, and it was attributed to ecstasy. While in the past he says some have been known to take ecstasy pills at raves, this was different – he was noticing people passing out, having seizures and overdosing.

“But I didn't know ecstasy was such a dangerous drug. So I kind of went down the rabbit hole and found out that almost all of the ecstasy available was now adulterated.

“It was adulterated with these brand new drugs, all of them were synthetic, all of them were made in China, and the most powerful one was fentanyl.”

But not all of China’s pharmaceutical or chemist industry is to blame, of course. He says the trouble lies within a subsection of rogue chemists willing to make these illegal drugs in huge quantities.

“In fact, I was able to go inside one of these laboratories I posed as a drug dealer, and I saw one company making quantities of these drugs that I just couldn't even fathom.”

Westhoff says at one point his cover was almost blown, when one lab owner from Shanghai asked who he really was and whether he was a journalist.

“I kept denying it. And eventually though, they took me to the lab, I wanted to see you know what this environment was like because no journalist had ever been in one of these labs and to me it reminded me of the show Breaking Bad.

“And then the synthetic cannabis … there were huge piles of it … It was being bagged up, one kilo bags, whole drums filled with them.

“Then all of the synthetic cannabis on the tables reminded me of the movie Scarface actually - when at the end Al Pacino his face all covered with cocaine and he's got the big piles of cocaine on the table - except that there was much, much more being made at this lab I went to.”

Westhoff claims that the lab owner said in a candid moment that he was aware these drugs were dangerous and did harm, but justified it also by saying they were in fact legal in China.

However, in a recent report by Reuters, China denied that most of the illicit fentanyl entering the United States originated in China.

And China too is facing the same problem as the rest of the world with bringing in regulations for NPS, Westhoff says.

“There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these new drugs. When it comes to synthetic cannabis, there's something like more than 100 new ones every year.

“So the government of China has to ban each one, one by one. It takes a while for them to ban one. And then by that time, these chemists have already created a new one and it's just an endless sort of cat and mouse game.”

And these drugs end up going through post and across the world, Westhoff claims the owner said they went to places like Russia, Europe and the United States.

Having seen the effect of these drugs on others and how the industry worked, Westhoff says he would support pill testing at raves or parties because, whether we like it or not, people are going to use drugs and this is one way to ensure safety.