I dont think anyone can. Hello, are these on . So much for joining us for this panel. If you want to take a moment to silence your cellphones it would be much appreciated. Thanks so much for joining us. My name is nateblakeslee, ill be your moderator. For ben westhoff book which is called Fentanyl Incorporated how rogue chemists are treating the deadliest waveof the opioid epidemic. Its my pleasure to introduce then. Then is an awardwinning Investigative Reporter who has written several books. Two of which were about the history of rap music, ben was once the music editor for the la weekly both those books were well received as ive been this book. Ben was featured on fresh air as im sure a number of you, this is a fresh haircut and the crowd probably. It was also accepted in the atlantic and has gotten wonderful reviews so help me thank ben for coming to austin texas. Ben and i will discuss the books for probably about 30 minutes and then if anyone wants to leave 15 minutes for q a soplease stick around at the end if you have questions. Lets start at the beginning. The probably, i know there are many people in texas have never heard of fentanyl so please tell us what it is and why it is killing so many people. Eight,thank you for coming here. Its great tobe here. No, you can think of as synthetic heroin. It is the third way of the Opioid Crisis. So the first way, began in the 1990s. With the over prescription of pills like oxycontin. So there was a sea change in the way doctors started thinking about pain. And when that was combined with this deceptive advertising from Companies LikePurdue Pharma which convinced doctors that opioids were not actually addictive, in combination it led to a situation where people were receiving more pain pills than ever before. Their stories of places like kermit west virginia, a count of 400 people that received literally millions of pills a year you that our pill mills and patience, people who had legitimate needs for these pills found that when their prescriptions were finished they were addicted area and so many of them turned to street heroin. And so heroin represents is a second wave of the Opioid Crisis. Now, as of the last five years or so, in a lot of places its almost impossible to find your heroin anywhere. Almost all of its is fentanyl. And fentanyl represents the third way of the opioid epidemic. So fentanyl is also an opioid and satisfies the same cravings as prescription pills like oxycontin as well as heroin. The biggest difference is that it is the times stronger. And so drug dealers using as a costsaving measure. So a lot of times when people think theyre buying heroin, what theyre actually buying is a mixture of heroin and the sentinel so it kills them instantly. That is the crux of the fentanyl epidemic its a drug that most people dont even want. Thought a little bit about the result of this process of combining fentanyl with a known drug. What i found fascinating about the book is often the people producing the drug dont know how much until theyre putting inthere themselves. So fentanyl is also an important medical drug use in hospitals. So when a child, fentanyl is used in the for many who are getting colonoscopies are often given fentanyl and its also comes as a pain patch. And even a lollipop use for people with cancer and sort of endoflife care. When we hear about all these decks, were not hearing about hospital fentanyl. Its almost all illicit fentanyl and its almost all made inchina. So this fentanyl get into the us in one of two ways. One way is right through the us mail. And the u. S. Postal service, fedex, ups, dhl, they also know and other types of through the mail. Also comes to china through the mexican cartels. Importance it up and send it north through the border and its distributed through the same channels as like heroin, cocaine and meth. When the fentanyl arrived in the mexican cartels its usually pretty pure. 90 percent pure or more but the cartels with other putting agents, sometimes up like a benadryl, all sorts of cutting agents and then it set north through the border. The regional distributors even more and by the time it gets into the hands of the street buyers, nobody knows how strong it is. Thats a problem. Even the drug dealers themselves dont know how strong it is. But its also as you alluded to very hard to mix so it only takes 2 grains of rice were of fentanyl to overdose. Its barely visible to the eye so when drug dealers fight to mix it up, mix heroin with fentanyl, its almost impossible to do. I talked to a former fentanyl dealer used a mr. Coffee coffee grinder to mix up the fentanyl and heroin and this is the same mr. Coffee grinder you buy in the store and the result of that is you get whats known as hotspots. So some batches might be benign while other batches would make you overdose instantly. The book is not just about fentanyl, its about an entire class of drugs which you are calling novel psychoactive substances. Essentially, drugs that were concocted in a laboratory that imitate other more familiar drugs that typically come from a plant. The opium, poppy or marijuana or thecoca leaf. Many of these drugs were done , were created by legitimate researchers trying to advance science inone form or another. Can you talk about how the process from how those drugs go froma legitimate lab to a Clandestine Lab . When you think about traditional drugs, youve got heroin as you mentioned. Cocaine, marijuana. These all come from natural plants like you said so its very expensive and timeconsuming to grow the opium poppy for example. Its very susceptible to lawenforcement. Youve got these big deals, it easy for the policeto find out about them but these new drugs that youre talking about , novelpsychoactive substances are all synthetic. And theyre all made in a lab. So in the past they use the call them designer drugs. Basically the same thing. These are drugs that because they are synthetic, they can they manipulated so for example fentanyl, if you change the chemical structure just a little bit now youve got whats known as an analog of fentanyl and sometimes these fentanyl analogs are Even Stronger and more deadly than fentanylitself. So now we have literally hundreds and hundreds of new drugs whereas hundred years ago we only had a handful of drugs. Now we have up to hundred new ones each year. And so a lot of these drugs were actually invented like youre saying for legitimate medicalpurposes. And so they were made in medical science laboratories in the 70s and 80s. Then these drugs sort of work published in papers but these papers just sat around on dusty shelves in university libraries. No one taken too much attention until the internet age. In the internet age, all these old papers started to be published online and so clandestine chemists, the rogue chemist that i mentioned in my books title, they go on the internet and exhaustively work out all of these papers where scientists are talking about new drugs. These drugs might have said were intended for a medical purpose and they repurpose them as recreational drugs. Many are sold on the darkwet. They are also sold on the clear web they have in common is that theyre all made in china. This might be a good time to talk about the dark wet so im guessing you know, thats another thing people are not familiar with what emerges as a way to distribute these illegal and the esses, can you talk about the dark wet and its role . Dark wet is basically a disguised internet protocol where it is impossible to find out whos publishing a webpage. So the dark when his most famous for these markets, these bazaars sell everything illegal under the sunday so the most famous one was called silk road and that was taken down a few years ago. Space in texas . Congratulations. But the silk road and these other dark web markets at everything from guns to drugs you like fake rolex watches credit card numbers. Child pornography. Its really like the wild west. And its very hard to crack down unless theres some sort of human error so the code is basically unbreakable and a lot of times people who are buying and selling humidity by encrypted messages and its very hard to crack. So thats sort of immersed as the place where these new drugs are bought and sold and the scariest part is that teenagers are some of the most common consumers using the dark wet because theres so savvy result in situations where these teenagers and online, go on the dark web, by drugs using that coin, the crypto currency and have these drugs delivereddirectly to their door. You talk about the anonymity of the dark web some of these healers on the dark web were so confident in their anonymity that they were willing to talk to you, a reporter acknowledging yourself as a reporter in some depth about what they did. I was surprised, i wanted to interview dark web dealers and a number of them talk to me and one was willing to meet in person so this was a dark web dealer who was selling different analogs of fentanyl. So after fentanyl was banned these different analogs were still legal in china so what he would do is order different types of fentanyl analogs from china , then sent directly to his home and he would repackage them and sell them on the dark web. So i wanted to know his story. How you can morally justify this type of action considering the sign there. Keep going, you never know whats going to happen. Its a metaphor maybe of this literary festival. The scene by the way where you make this dark web dealer in person and even his daughter in the meeting, it was just an outstanding scene in the book. Talk about his rationale for why he did what he did. I was surprised, we met at a Fast Food Restaurant and he bought brought his daughter and he claimed to be doing good in the world and what he said was he wasnt opioid addict himself. He had been addicted to pain pills for a long time but they are very expensive and what he said was that the type of fentanyl that he sold was as a nasal spray so he actually made his own nasal spray. He showed it to me. It looked like something you would buy at cvs or walgreens except that it was much, much stronger than yourtypical opioid medicine. So one spray from this nasal spray was the equivalent of taking like a big oversized oxycontin pill and what he said was his prices were so affordable that he could help one contradicted opioid users maintain their addiction for a fraction of the cost of buying oxycontin and he said considering that big pharma and these Companies LikePurdue Pharma which are now being sued all over the country, considering the damage theyve done to this country, he considered this a sort of alternative way for people to maintain their addiction. He was kind of a robin hood figure. He didnt see himself that way. The other chapters in the book that really saying to me were the ones where you went to china and that for me was what separated this book from just that kind of a star ill report on a crisis the one that is really a wonderful read. Talk about your trips to china. Iq for those kind words. Back in 2017 i started reporting on fentanyl and ernest and everyone kept saying im 2017 was killing more people than any drug annually in american history. Worst crack avenue, worst end, worse than heroin or pills so i kept hearing all these physics. But no one had ever gone to the store. No onehad ever gone to china. Though i thought well, where do i start i dont speak chinese. So i just started googling by fentanyl in china. On the real web. On the service web. And it may sound silly but the list of companies came up. Dozens and dozens of Different Companies selling fentanyl in china just popped right up and i clicked on the webpages. They had their sales peoples email addresses right there i justemailed them , made a fake email address area i said i was interested in buying fentanyl and that if i came to chinawith baby willing to show me their lab . Lots of themsaid yes. So in early 2018, i bought a plane ticket and i showed up. I went to a city called wuhan and wuhan is not known to most westerners its a city of 11 million people. Its a chemical manufacturing hub. So they make a lot of legal chemicals. Thats mainly what they do. How to have a lot of universities there who produce scientists and chemists. Most of them go into the legitimate field but some of them into these illicit fields. And i found out there was a Company Called yuanchan who was making more fentanyl ingredients than any other company so no precursors are basically whats drivingthis epidemic. They are whats sold to the mexican cartels who make the rest of fentanyl the way and then north of the border and the equipment of sudafed so if you heard about the math prices you heard about these backwoods meth labs and these cooks would go into the cvs or walgreens and come out with all the sudafed in the store and use the sudafed to make meth. These fentanyl precursors are basically the equivalent and without them the mexican cartels worked in business. They dont have the can make these precursors. I went to this company and i emailed the salesperson and i said id like to meet you at your company and they said sure, we will meet you there at noon so i was actually based in a big hotel. I showed up in the lobby and i didnt know what was happening. It didnt look like a Chemical Company but they took me upstairs and showed me they had two floors of the hotel dedicated to their sales staff. So their sales staff was basically twentysomething recent college graduates, almost all of them and there were hundreds of them. They were in your goals, they look just like a western office and. And this was considered a good job for someone who spoke english. Exactly, they had a great health plan read gay people free cellphones to the employees. They had like movie nights where everybody went out, had free room and board. It turns out the salespeople lived in the hotel and all the while, they were selling chemicals for the deadliest dog on earth. In their mind legally or at least producing itlegally in china. It was legal in china and i even know it was legal in the us area the salespeople claimed not to know about the no problem so at first i was dubious but i found out that really fentanyl doesnt register in china even though it makes more fentanyl, the citizens there dont have a fentanyl problem so the fails salespeople said we dont even know what this is, we dont know why its sopopular. Some of these salespeople are selling from the same factory so maybe its just another one that somebody is interested in. They also claimed to sell 10,000 other chemicals. Some of them were maybe real basil sometime but their main moneymaker as the salespeople told me were the antenatal precursors and also steroids. They sell lots ofanabolic steroids which is the same situation. Itslegal in china schedule in the west. You have ever not provocative in this action of the book that you dont explore too much but its possible it makes a few people at the upper levels of these operations in china this is a reverse opium war situation. If youre familiar with the chinese opium war there were two of them in the early 19th century and basically england was selling lots and lots of opium to china. The chinese citizens were getting addicted in large numbers. So basically china said we want you to stop doing this but england refused. They went to war and then england one and in the spoils of war, england was given hong kong and so thats why it was the property of england. And went to war because the trade was so valuable they could not afford to see it and. Exactly, it was making so much money for england so now some people think of the fentanyl situation as a sort of reverse opium war because now china is selling this opioid and its people in the west who are consuming it and becoming addicted. Talk about what can be done or is being done by the Us Government with respect to what china is doing. The Us Government was very slow to act about the fentanyl crisis. In fact as recently as 2015, the dea published in their annual report that said fentanyl is not really a drug going to have to worry about. Its too powerful, users dont like it. And so basically, nothing to see here. There was only one year later in 2016 fentanyl overtook heroin and these other drugs to becomethe deadliest in us history. So since then, theres been a lot of sort of typical war on drugs policies we seen and in my book i explore a more rational way to battle the fentanyl crisis and i believe its something known as harm reduction. Harm reduction is basically this idea that people are always going to use drugs and as much as we dont want them to, theres nothing we can really do to stop them. Except we can try to make it safer. So there are a lot of different policies here towards our reduction in one of them is calledfentanyl testing strips. A lot of the reason people die from fentanyl is because they take other drugs fentanyl is in their area the singer prints and the singer tom petty both died because they prescription pills they thought were regular opioids but they were actually with fentanyl. Our rapper max miller diedthe same way. So one thing fentanyl testing strips to is you can make a mixture of your dog and you can get these strips in their. Just like a pregnancy test. You get them in and if theres one strike that fentanyl, if theres 2 stripes theres no and studies have shown that drug users are dumb. They realize if theres fentanyl in theretheyre less likely to use the drugs and therefore less likely to overdose and die but what the dea said about fentanyl was true, users dont like it. Theyre desperate to get the products they can get. Exactly and there are some instances where fentanyl is being sold as fentanyl and for some people its so powerful that actually attraction, but the vast majority of people only want the drug that they want so i also traveled to spain and they have an Amazing Program there, called to provide injection facilities these are places where users can legally go and use drugs. They can shoot up heroin or fentanyl, smoke crack cocaine red sounds crazy to most americans but there are doctors and nurses onsite. There are clean needles. There are treatment programs. Its basically all dedicated to making sure that people long time users can use these drugs safely and theyve never had a facility, had a death that one of these facilities anywhere in europe or canada where they have these facilities in the us they are illegal and there are none that are operating legally here. We seem to be much closer to a second possible solution you suggest in thebook which is legalizing marijuana. You point out the reason that might cut down on some of these overdoses is because its something we havent even talked about which there is a synthetic marijuana even though its a total misnomer, its not marijuana at all but if the