A remarkable four-year investigation into the dangerous world of synthetic drugs--from black market drug factories in China to users and dealers on the streets of the U.
S.
From its depths, as Westhoff relates, are emerging new strategies that may provide essential long-term solutions to the drug crisis that has affected so many..
Together they represent the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a calamity we are just beginning to understand. and Europe.
Poignantly, he chronicles the lives of addicted users and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug awareness organizers in the U.
S.
Westhoff visits the shady factories in China from which these drugs emanate, providing startling and original reporting on how China\'s vast chemical industry operates, and how the Chinese government subsidizes it.
He tracks down the little-known scientists who invented these drugs and inadvertently killed thousands, as well as a mysterious drug baron who turned the law upside down in his home country of New Zealand.
Westhoff has infiltrated this shadowy world.
Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by Rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay ahead of the law, making the drugs\' effects impossible to predict.
Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice--and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe-- were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes.
They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs--and all-too-often tragically lethal.
These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana.
A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape, writes Ben Westhoff. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. to harm reduction activists in Europe--which reveals for the first time the next Wave of the Opioid Epidemic A deeply human story, Fentanyl, Inc.
A remarkable four-year investigation into the dangerous world of synthetic drugs--from black market drug factories in China to users and dealers on the streets of the U.
S
