Fentanyl, Inc.. Ben Westhoff
years later, in 2016, when it enacted the Psychoactive Substances Act, which sought to ban anything that could get a person high, with medicine, alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine specifically exempted. The purpose of the bill was to combat “legal highs,” such as synthetic cannabinoids and ecstasy knockoffs, which had been sold lawfully in head shops—but the bill had unseen ramifications. The Church of England and the Catholic Church were worried that using incense in services could lead to prosecution, and the bill’s implementation was delayed over concerns that the difficulty of defining psychoactive might make the law problematic to enforce. Ultimately it was implemented and did successfully remove “legal highs” from store shelves, but the long-term ramifications aren’t yet fully understood.
The 1989 police action comedy Tango & Cash, starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as narcotics detectives with outsize opinions of themselves, may not have gotten great reviews, but it did inspire the name of a new fentanyl product, which began killing people in the northeastern United States in early 1991. The deceased included residents of New York City, Newark and Paterson in New Jersey, and Hartford, Connecticut. Almost all of the drug called Tango and Cash seemed to originate from an open-air drug market in the Bronx, near 138th Street and Brook Avenue, described in the Hartford Courant as, “a kind of regional wholesaler to dealers from cities around the Northeast.” Paramedic Steven Harbeson recalled a sudden, dramatic increase in Hartford overdose calls. Before the opioid-antidote Narcan was available as a nasal spray, first responders would inject it straight into the vein. “Many of the heroin users back then would leave a vein available for EMS,” he remembered. Over the weekend beginning February ٢, ١٩٩١, Tango and Cash caused a dozen deaths and more than one hundred overdoses.
The New York Times quoted a thirty-nine-year-old heroin user named Richie, who was pursuing the drug despite its toxic effects. “When an addict hears that someone O.D.’d, the first question they ask is: ‘Where’d they get it?’ Because they want to find some of it for themselves.”
The deaths continued. During 1991 and 1992, 126 people in the Northeast died from this new fentanyl product, which was also sometimes called China White. More than twenty of the deceased came from Philadelphia. “Some of the Philadelphia junkies died so swiftly that syringes were still embedded in their arms,” reported the Baltimore Sun. Alpha-methylfentanyl, even though it had been scheduled in 1981, was discovered in some of the Tango and Cash batches. (News reports from this era weren’t always clear about whether the drugs involved were fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue like alpha-methylfentanyl, so the term fentanyl is used below to reference both.)
For almost two years, police remained stymied in their search for the drug’s source. But then in December 1992, they received a valuable clue from a Boston drug dealer named Christopher Moscatiello. In the midst of a fentanyl sale, he mentioned to a customer that his Wichita, Kansas, supplier had nearly died from a fentanyl overdose. Moscatiello didn’t realize it at the time, but the customer was actually a DEA agent.
DEA began pursuing the tip, despite the fact that Kansas seemed an odd place for a fentanyl laboratory, since the Midwest wasn’t yet associated with deaths from the substance. But it turned out the supplier in question had Eastern ties. He was a Pittsburgh businessman named Joseph Martier. In August 1992 paramedics responding to a 911 call found Martier passed out in a storage building near Wichita, having overdosed on fentanyl. In February, 1993, the DEA arrested Martier and raided his facility, alleging that his was the country’s only lab making fentanyl. This drug, the agency noted, was “the serial killer of the drug world.”
Also taken into custody was Martier’s partner, a drug cook named George Marquardt. No ordinary illicit chemist, Marquardt was an oddly philosophical, hyperintelligent chemistry prodigy. A retired DEA agent later called him “the very best illicit chemist in the history of American drugmaking.”
As a child Marquardt had been fascinated by “an anti-drug film in which a mouse on LSD chased a cat.” Before he was old enough to drive, he was making heroin with a friend, and after doing research for the University of Wisconsin (from which he pilfered lab equipment) he pretended to be a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, falsely adding the claim to his CV in an attempt to trick a Milwaukee college into accepting him as a physics lecturer. The ruse succeeded.
Marquardt single-handedly fashioned his own mass spectrometer, a complicated scientific instrument used to identify chemicals, and became a drug mercenary for hire, eschewing the academic world because it didn’t pay enough. But he was genuinely fascinated with the magic of chemistry and had a selfless streak as well. At one point, he said, he synthesized clandestine AZT for people with AIDS. Marquardt made his name, however, with hard drugs, venturing further and further into a dangerous underworld, emboldened by a belief—similar to one held by Walter White of the series Breaking Bad—that drug kingpins wouldn’t kill him because he made a superior product. He first learned about fentanyl in 1978, while doing jail time after being busted at his Oklahoma meth lab. Upon his release he began producing fentanyl, but not before doing his homework. “I read the forensic science literature religiously,” he said. “I read publications like Police Science Abstracts. Surveyed all the appearances of fentanyl everywhere that I could find out from the literature. And gave careful thought to what these people had done wrong.” He reported spending more than a week at a time cooking up batches, and he sought to make different varieties of fentanyl so his products would appear to come from different labs and thus confuse the authorities.
The DEA, however, believed it could trace the 126 Northeastern deaths back to Marquardt and Martier’s lab, and Marquardt was charged with distributing and manufacturing fentanyl. He immediately confessed to his crimes. “I just don’t bother with the lies,” he said. “When the game’s over, it’s just over. If you can’t deal with the consequences of these things, you should have carried a lunch bucket.” In the end, Marquardt’s products were thought to have killed more people than initially suspected—perhaps two hundred or even three hundred. He served twenty-two years in prison and was released in 2015.
Marquardt now swears he is done with fentanyl, but he has little remorse. “I don’t feel like I’m supplying a product to an innocent or naïve population,” he said. “I attach no blame to them. They are what they are. I am what I am. We’re both criminals.”
The moral discussion of accountability becomes more complicated when one considers legitimate university scientists who, like Marquardt, were also making fentanyls. They sought to patent new chemicals that would benefit the study of medicine and, ultimately, people suffering from pain. For this reason, most people would give them the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that they were often motivated by financial gain as well—and that such scientists sometimes unwittingly paved the way for rogue chemists to exploit their work.
A fentanyl analogue called 3-methylfentanyl, patented by a University of Mississippi professor of medicinal chemistry named Thomas Riley, provides a case in point. Riley developed it from Paul Janssen’s original fentanyl, and hoped that 3-methylfentanyl might perhaps maintain fentanyl’s potent analgesic (or pain-reducing) qualities, without sharing its dangerous attributes, and catch on as a medical product. In 1973, he and two other collaborators published a paper about their studies of 3-methylfentanyl on rats, but the results were not what Riley hoped. It was never commercially marketed, and he never made any money off it.
With addicted users, however, 3-methylfentanyl was a huge hit. In the late 1980s it killed eighteen people in western Pennsylvania. Predating Tango and Cash, this was the first major case of fentanyl-related deaths since the California overdoses earlier in the decade.
More than a decade later, 3-methylfentanyl was at the center of an armed hostage crisis in Moscow. On October 23, 2002, a huge crowd had gathered in a converted ball-bearing factory for the performance of Nord-Ost (Northeast), a musical celebrating Russian heritage that was the most expensive production of its kind in the country’s history. The show came to an abrupt halt when dozens of Chechen rebels seized control of the facility, taking about eight hundred attendees hostage and threatening to kill them if the Chechen war with Russia wasn’t immediately