Fentanyl, Inc.. Ben Westhoff
they were hijacked by drug traffickers, they were designed to benefit society. It took decades before they landed in the hands of people looking to get high, people like Bailey Henke and Kain Schwandt.
Grand Forks is an unlikely place to be at the center of a new synthetic-drug wave. A purple dot in a red state—where the locals say “pop” instead of “soda”—it couldn’t be further removed from the world’s drug epicenters. Though it’s one of North Dakota’s biggest cities, Grand Forks is really a small college town at heart, located on the scenic banks of the Red River. Some money from the oil boom on the other side of the state has trickled in, but the town remains quiet. The University of North Dakota’s Fighting Hawks (no longer known as the “Fighting Sioux”) play at their slick hockey arena, and Charlotte’s lefse stand at the farmers market offers a traditional Norwegian treat of mashed potatoes fried on a grill and served like flatbread.
It’s the kind of place where locals would sooner make cheerful pleasantries than burden someone with their struggles. Still, its residents have battled drug problems before. Like many Midwestern towns, it was hit hard by methamphetamines, starting in the late 1990s. Homemade labs were prevalent, until police crackdowns, and revised laws banning easy access to the cold medicines favored by crank cooks, drove the labs out. Yet the demand for meth and other hard drugs persisted. The beginning of the 2010s saw the local influx of the first NPS, a new designer chemical known as K2. Often called Spice or synthetic marijuana, K2 has little in common with traditional marijuana, which gives the user a mellow buzz, whereas K2 often makes people’s hearts race, or makes them overdose. Ironically, however, K2 could be bought legally in many places at this time. In fact, a head shop in Grand Forks called Discontent sold it openly.
One day while Bailey Henke was in high school, his mother, Laura, found an empty packet of K2 in the house. He lied, denying he had been using it, and instead said it belonged to his buddy Tanner Gerszewski. Suspicious, Henke’s mother forced him to sit down and watch videos of people freaking out while high on synthetic-marijuana strains like K2—which are more accurately called synthetic cannabinoids. Bailey watched as the users screamed and ran around in circles, losing their minds.
Laura also paid a visit to Gerszewski’s house, just around the corner. “I’m really scared the boys are using this,” she told Tanner’s mom, who seconded her concern and added that she was planning to have her son tested for marijuana.
Little did Tanner’s mom know that the threat of these tests was what inspired her son to use K2 in the first place. Unlike traditional marijuana, synthetic cannabinoids don’t show up on drug tests—not the kind parents give to their kids and not the kind instituted by employers. In fact, that’s what made K2 so popular—plus the fact that US lawmakers, since they didn’t yet know what it was, hadn’t made it illegal.
There were other benefits too, at least in the eyes of Bailey and Tanner. K2 was potent—their other friends said it made them feel like they were dying—and they personally enjoyed the extra jolt. “That’s what me and Bailey liked,” Gerszewski said. “For us, it didn’t stop at going to a party and drinking and smoking on the weekends. It was about getting fucked up.”
But now that he was out of high school and saddled with an opioid addiction, Henke resolved to get his life together. On the December 2014 road trip, after visiting Henke’s parents in Minot, they drove out to see Kain Schwandt’s family in Montana. It was a good time, and as they drove back eastward they congratulated themselves on accomplishing their goal. “We had both gotten clean,” said Schwandt.
Around the same time in 2014, in Portland, Oregon, a woman named Channing Lacey was sliding into her black leather stiletto boots. The twenty-seven-year-old mother of two worked as a dominatrix, controlling a stable of male slaves she had met on the Internet. Bespectacled and clad in black leather and fishnet stockings, she would beat them with whips, step on them with her high heels, or even apply clothespins—which were attached to a rope—all over their bodies and then rip them off with a flick of the rope. For the privilege, men would pay $150 to $200 an hour.
Lacey enjoyed her dominatrix alter ego. “I was into it,” she said. “It got a bunch of my aggression out.” This work was an escape from the rest of her life, which was becoming increasingly consumed by fentanyl. She was not only hooked on it but was assisting in one of the country’s biggest illicit fentanyl operations.
Growing up in Las Vegas, Lacey had dropped out of high school and gotten pregnant, in 2004, at age seventeen. After her son was born she was prescribed the opioid Vicodin and soon became addicted to pain pills. She began “doctor shopping” to get her fix. “I’d go to hospitals, I’d go to dentists, I’d get different prescriptions,” she said, including those for OxyContin, an even stronger opioid. “I manipulated the system really bad.” She even went so far as to marry a man in order to get on his health insurance.
Lacey moved to the Portland area around 2005, and a year or so later descended further into drug abuse, using meth and heroin. She got clean and had a second son but then went back to heroin in the early 2010s, using more heavily than before. Her habit led her to a dope house in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, where she met an intriguing man named Brandon Hubbard. Though he was more than ten years her senior, Lacey found in him a kindred spirit, one who also loved BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism). Short, with brown hair and a piercing stare, Hubbard was a star wrestler in high school who later spent time in the Navy, as well as fishing for king crab in Alaska.
But his life began to spiral after he crashed his bicycle in 2005, which left his right arm paralyzed. He was prescribed heavy doses of OxyContin for years, and after being cut off by his doctor eventually moved to street heroin.
Caught up in a druggy, infatuated haze, Hubbard and Lacey became joined at the hip. “We were together every day after that,” Lacey said, adding that her mother, who lived nearby, looked after her kids. “I was a really bad addict. I was out of control.”
Despite her dexterity with a whip, Lacey didn’t hold a steady job, and Hubbard wasn’t really working either. To feed their heroin addictions, Hubbard sold his OxyContin pills. It was a small-time drug hustle, and he soon shifted to selling black tar heroin, working with a local man who had a reliable connection and a good price.
Hubbard’s business really took off, however, when he moved onto the Dark Web around 2013. This disguised Internet protocol was quickly helping local dealers like Hubbard become wealthy, international players. And it was enabling tech-savvy teenagers to get potent drugs delivered right to their front door by the mail carrier.
In the past, to obtain illicit drugs, a buyer often had to meet up with a dealer in an alleyway or on a dangerous street corner. But as of the early 2010s one doesn’t even have to leave the bedroom; it’s as easy as booting up a smartphone or laptop. To access the Dark Web, one needs a special browser, such as Tor, which disguises one’s location and identity and makes it possible to load Dark Web sites. Because these sites have hidden IP addresses, it’s almost impossible to figure out who’s running them.
Not everyone on the Dark Web is a criminal. Facebook even has a presence, to circumvent censors in countries where it’s banned, like China. But the Dark Web is best known for its illegal emporiums, which run the gamut from extremely untrustworthy to quite professional, and sell almost every form of vice imaginable: credit card numbers, fake Rolexes, pornography passwords, weapons, and malware. “Make $3,000+ a Month as Fake Uber Driver,” read one recent listing. It’s stunningly easy to buy drugs—and not just traditional drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana, but powerful NPS like fentanyl and K2.
The most famous of these markets, Silk Road, was founded by a Libertarian-leaning, magic-mushroom selling, tech autodidact named Ross Ulbricht and rapidly became a billion-dollar enterprise. Using sophisticated programming techniques to cover his tracks, Ulbricht established Silk Road in 2011 and eluded law enforcement for more than two years. (A rogue DEA agent, selling him tips for $50,000 each, helped him evade capture.) Growing increasingly paranoid and allegedly commissioning six murders, Ulbricht was finally arrested at a San Francisco library in 2013 and eventually sentenced to life in prison. In Silk Road’s stead, another Dark Web behemoth called AlphaBay