Fentanyl, Inc.. Ben Westhoff
who that year received life in prison; and Daniel Vivas Ceron, who pled guilty to charges including importing controlled substances resulting in death, and was awaiting sentencing at the time this book went to print. Investigators believe Hubbard earned millions from his Dark Web sales of fentanyl and heroin, and in his plea deal he took responsibility for the deaths of Bailey Henke and another Grand Forks teenager, nineteen-year-old Evan Poitra, who died in July 2014. Others on the periphery of the wide-ranging case were convicted as well, including Kain Schwandt, who spent about a year and a half behind bars, for conspiracy to possess illicit drugs with intent to distribute, and Channing Lacey, who snuck in fentanyl when she went to jail and distributed it there, causing a fatal overdose. She received eleven years for drug distribution resulting in death. For its efforts, in November 2018, Operation Denial received special recognition from the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Yet for all of Operation Denial’s convictions, it has not been able to snag the person at the very top of the drug pyramid, Jian Zhang, the Chinese man accused of manufacturing and selling the fentanyl that killed Henke and others. Zhang is a chemical trader born in 1978 and operating out of the Eastern China city of Qingdao. His company claims to make benign food additives, including spices and soy products, but in April, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to Fargo to unseal an indictment against Zhang, accusing him of leading a drug ring that sold fentanyl throughout the United States. The indictment listed eleven states, including North Dakota and Oregon.
Zhang has been pursued with the full weight of not just the US Department of Justice but also the Treasury, which charged him as a kingpin under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, blocking his US financial assets and those of his company, Zaron Bio-Tech (Asia) Limited. “Combating the flow of fentanyl into the United States is a top priority of this administration,” Sigal Mandelker, under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement. “This action will disrupt the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into the United States.”
Yet the United States couldn’t jail Jian Zhang, because China refused to turn him over. The country has no extradition treaty with the United States, and China does not believe Zhang to be a criminal. Zhang was briefly detained in China, but then released without being charged, and Yu Haibin, director of precursor chemical control at China’s Narcotics Control Commission, said they did not have “solid evidence” that he broke Chinese law. Further, Chinese officials are quick to note, most NPS were invented in labs in Europe and the United States. And this isn’t just a problem of production—it’s one of consumption. China believes America needs to control its drug problem.
Considering that fentanyl has been banned (except for medical use) in China for decades, it’s unclear why China could not, or simply did not, prosecute Zhang. But there’s an even bigger problem. Many of the other NPS killing Americans, Europeans, and others are still 100 percent legal in China, even while banned in the West. In recent years, some of the biggest new drug kingpins can’t be successfully prosecuted. The Pablo Escobars of today are coming out of China, and they don’t have to worry about being imprisoned by their government. They can often operate free and in the clear, within the boundaries of their country’s own laws. Whenever a deadly new drug is made illegal in China, manufacturers simply tweak its chemical structure and start producing a new drug that is still legal. Many fentanyl analogues and synthetic cannabinoids have been made this way. Though Chinese authorities have pledged to crack down—and in May, 2019, banned all fentanyl analogues—their efforts so far have barely dented the country’s clandestine international trade.
The rise of fentanyl and NPS happened quickly. When I started investigating these new drugs in 2013, fentanyl wasn’t on the public radar at all. I had never heard of it. In fact, I only came to this story by accident.
Living in Los Angeles at the time, as the music editor at LA Weekly, I was investigating why so many people were dying at raves. Electronic dance music (EDM) had recently exploded in popularity, and with its rise came increasing deaths, mostly young kids experimenting with ecstasy.
I wasn’t new to the scene. In the late 1990s I partied in abandoned San Francisco warehouses and deserted beach spots as part of the first wave of American electronic dance music—people then called it electronica. These events were usually populated only by those who had garnered a personal invitation from a friend of the organizer; to get directions one had to call a secret phone line. On the scene, maybe a few dozen people would dance to cutting-edge, drum-machine-driven beats. The drugs, ecstasy and LSD, made participants especially appreciate exotic rhythms. These ravers and club kids wore fluorescent colors and giant goggles and chewed on pacifiers or breathed Vicks VapoRub beneath surgical masks to enhance the sensation of ecstasy.
I, along with most Americans, dropped out of the scene by the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. EDM’s popularity continued unabated in Europe, while in the United States many stars saw their music fall off the charts. But by the 2010s electronic dance music was back and bigger than ever, drawing tens of thousands of neon-clad kids to raves. The new raves couldn’t have been more different from the underground parties I had attended. No longer secret affairs featuring obscure sounds, today’s EDM events feature celebrity DJs spinning in mammoth venues such as stadiums and racetracks. Electric Daisy Carnival, now held every spring in Las Vegas, draws some four hundred thousand attendees. In the music industry, which had been decimated by audio-sharing services and still hadn’t recovered in the early 2010s, EDM was a shining star, awash in profits and adored by millions of young fans. And Los Angeles was the center of its universe. EDM was being celebrated in the national media as a big neon party that never ended.
And then I heard about the deaths.
In 2010, fifteen-year-old Sasha Rodriguez fatally overdosed at Electric Daisy Carnival at the LA Coliseum, reportedly from ecstasy. Local politicians revolted, and the event was forced to relocate to Las Vegas. A Plymouth State University student named Brittany Flannigan overdosed and died in late August 2013 after attending a Boston EDM concert featuring the popular DJ Zedd, and just days later a University of Virginia student named Mary “Shelley” Goldsmith passed away as well. Both were nineteen, and reports said they had taken “Molly.”
At the time, many believed Molly was pure MDMA, the drug found in ecstasy, also known as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. But this didn’t seem right. The Molly users I witnessed dipped their fingers into a plastic bag of white powder and then licked it off, repeating the process every ten minutes or so. Some would snort it. This was different from my heyday on the rave scene. Back then, the ravers I knew simply took a pill and would be happily rolling for the whole night.
With mega-raves came increasing numbers of casualties. At New York’s Electric Zoo over Labor Day weekend in 2013, a twenty-year-old University of New Hampshire student named Olivia Rotondo and a twenty-three-year-old recent graduate of Syracuse University named Jeffrey Russ both collapsed and died, reportedly after taking Molly. At the Hard Summer festival in August 2015, outside Los Angeles, two young women fatally overdosed and forty-nine people had to be taken to emergency rooms. The event sparked a Los Angeles Times article quoting emergency-room doctors as saying that raves on LA-county-owned property should be banned, at least temporarily. “If the county wants to make money while people are dying and medically compromised,” said Dr. Philip Fagan Jr., emergency department director at Los Angeles’s Good Samaritan Hospital, “they should come out and say it.”
These weren’t just freak accidents. The more I covered the EDM scene, the more I realized how widespread the fatalities were. Six people overdosed and died at a single EDM festival in Malaysia in 2014, while just about every major US EDM concert—including Electric Daisy Carnival, Nocturnal Wonderland, Together as One, Monster Massive, Coachella, Ultra, and Electric Forest—saw festival-goers die from drug use. No statistics were available about the number of deaths at EDM festivals. But no one could dispute a disturbing fact: the number was growing.
Officials blamed ecstasy—a word many used synonymously with Molly—but that contradicts the relatively benign nature of the chemical. “You don’t see many ecstasy overdose deaths,” confirmed Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe, a Denver-based organization dedicated to harm reduction at music festivals and other events. He estimates that MDMA deaths per year in the United