Fentanyl, Inc.. Ben Westhoff

       Five

      The easiest way to make MDMA, Sasha Shulgin wrote in PiHKAL, is to use a precursor called safrole. A naturally occurring chemical compound found in nutmeg and other spices, safrole was once used as an ingredient in root beer before it was banned as a food additive by the FDA. Animal-testing studies showed it could lead to cancer.

      Safrole oil smells like licorice, and is obtained by harvesting sassafras trees, which are found in various parts of the world including eastern Asia and North America. In the United States the trees don’t produce enough oil to make harvesting them profitable, but in countries like Myanmar, Vietnam, China, and Cambodia, the rise of ecstasy in the 1990s set off a scramble to turn native trees into a cash crop. Cambodia was particularly susceptible to exploitation by the ecstasy trade. The impoverished Southeast Asian nation of sixteen million people shares long, porous borders with Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, across which traffickers on bicycle, motorcycle, or even on foot dart through forests to evade detection. With few patrols and a history of corrupt officials turning their backs to drug crime, Cambodia maintains a reputation as a smuggling haven. It also possesses an abundance of a rare type of sassafras tree prized for its capacity to generate rich, highly potent safrole oil. Known as mreah prew phnom, it’s found in large quantities in a protected, mountainous area of the country called the Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary.

      The 1988 United Nations drug treaty produced an agreement to expand the drug war from crackdowns on illicit drugs to crackdowns on the compounds used to make them, including safrole oil.

      Traditionally in Southeast Asia, safrole oil has been used in small quantities to make medicines, including those used to salve skin irritations. But increasing demand for MDMA toward the end of the twentieth century created a multimillion-dollar trade in Cambodia, served by increasingly large and sophisticated operations. The oil was distilled inside factories that were protected by armed guards, and proprietors worked in tandem with poachers of pythons, pangolins, tigers, and other jungle animals. The distillers and poachers would eat the animals or sell them on black markets.

      The harvest required entire mreah prew phnom trees to be cut down and their roots chopped off and boiled in giant pots for nearly a week. The product, safrole oil, sold for $200 a gallon, each gallon enough to make thousands of ecstasy tablets. Apparently, many sassafras farmers were left in the dark as to its purpose. “Some erroneously suspected that it was used for yama, or methamphetamine,” wrote Myanmar-focused publication the Irrawaddy in 2009. “One thought it was used to make an atomic bomb.”

      The environmental damage became catastrophic, not just for the destroyed trees but also because leaking oil killed off fish, frogs, and other animals. “The illicit distilling of sassafras oil in these mountains is slowly but surely killing the forests and wildlife,” said David Bradfield, who served as adviser to the Wildlife Sanctuaries project of Fauna and Flora International in 2008. “The production of sassafras oil is a huge operation, which affects not only the area where the distilleries are actually located, but ripples outward, leaving devastation and destruction in its wake.” He added that the livelihoods of as many as fifteen thousand indigenous people—hunters-gatherers in the wildlife sanctuaries—were in jeopardy.

      Cambodian production ramped up, spiking after neighboring Vietnam banned production of safrole oil in 1999 and then again after China enforced stricter controls in 2004. Three years later, facing the real possibility that the mreah prew phnom tree might be felled into extinction, Cambodia banned the production of the oil.

      Simultaneously, Southeast Asian nations accelerated efforts to crack down on the safrole oil trade. In October 2007 three shipping ­containers—containing some fifty tons of the Cambodia-produced safrole oil—were seized at a port in southern Thailand. The containers—two bound for China, one for the United States—possessed an estimated cumulative value of $150 million.

      International agents intent on wiping out the trade sent an even louder message a year later. In June 2008, Cambodian and Australian federal police descended upon the Pursat province in western Cambodia, where they destroyed fifty safrole oil laboratories and arrested scores of people. Hoping to deter anyone else from continuing the practice, the officers—clad in gas masks and hazmat suits—publicly burned more than twelve hundred seized drums of the oil, blanketing the sky with giant clouds of black smoke. Enough safrole to make more than 200 million ecstasy pills—billions of dollars worth—went up in flames.

      Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies were pulling off ecstasy busts of historic proportions. In 2005, officials seized about a ton of the pills in Melbourne, Australia. In 2007, a drug baron named Rob Karam (who was out on bail and awaiting trial in the 2005 ecstasy seizure) traveled to Hong Kong to negotiate a massive ecstasy sale with the Calabrian Mafia, of southern Italy. The deal could have been worth billions. But the man Karam met with was working undercover for the Australian Federal Police. His information helped the government intercept about four tons of ecstasy pills shipped inside tomato cans.

      The international effort to disrupt the ecstasy trade was surprisingly successful. Though big drug seizures don’t always make a significant dent in supply, and eliminating one precursor chemical (another name for a critical drug ingredient) sometimes causes chemists to switch to another, this one-two punch was extremely effective. After peaking in the early years of the 2000s, MDMA became increasingly difficult to find.

      In the United Kingdom, where EDM (electronic dance music) culture was popular, the drought was most immediately evident. “There wasn’t any MDMA to be had, which is unusual in a market with 500,000 participants every week,” said journalist and drugs expert Mike Power.

      The site Pill Reports, where users post the results after testing their drugs, showed that much of the so-called ecstasy that began appearing on the UK scene was adulterated. This fact did not stop dance-floor denizens from swallowing pills anyway, but those who were paying attention quickly realized that something was amiss. The lack of safrole oil had forced the hands of ecstasy suppliers. “A number of international syndicates took a vote on whether or not to raise the wholesale prices on pills or look for cheaper substitutions,” an anonymous source with inside information is quoted as saying in Power’s book Drugs Unlimited. “Apparently the vote came down on the side of substitutions and it was after this that we started seeing more and more pills with what we could consider adulterants.”

      The MDMA drought affected dance-music culture across the world. In Europe it helped usher in a new class of exotic drugs known as “legal highs.” In the United States, adulterated ecstasy contributed to a spike in rave deaths. And at the bottom of the planet, in New Zealand, it ushered in a more insidious substance: meth. The problem got so bad that a quirky man who talked with God decided to do something about it.

      Born in 1971, Matt Bowden was a precocious kid. Growing up in New Zealand, he loved music and attended university early, at age sixteen. He studied computer science but soon dropped out. “I got bored,” he said. “I didn’t think I needed a degree to get along in life.” He played in a metal band and taught guitar for a living. In his twenties he was drawn in by the electronic music scene and its illicit substances.

      By the late 1990s he was a club kid on the nightlife scene. During the summer of 1998—the New Zealand “summer of love,” he called it—he was living in Auckland and the city was awash in MDMA. The dance-music scene was exploding, and everyone seemed to be hugging one another. The festivities continued on for a few years, until about 2003, when international eradication efforts slowed New Zealand’s ecstasy supply to a trickle.

      The drug landscape in small, far-flung New Zealand has long been different than that of most countries. Composed of two main islands and hundreds of smaller ones in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, New Zealand is the most isolated well-populated country in the world, a full thousand miles from Australia. Because of this isolation, certain drugs simply don’t proliferate there. “We are surrounded by water and