Books on Fentanyl
Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic
When award-winning journalist Ben Westhoff began covering the Electronic Dance Music scene in 2015 for L.A. Weekly, he noticed a disturbing trend. People were dying from party drugs at EDM events. For the next four years, Westhoff (Original Gangstas, Dirty South), followed the deadly trail of fentanyl, a drug that was created for legitimate medical use before Mexican cartels began adding illicit, Chinese-made fentanyl to heroin and other street drugs. In his new book, Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Atlantic), Westhoff exposes the origins of synthetic opioids and the devastating consequences of a drug crisis that is ravaging families and communities across America.
The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the U.S. to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths―at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever, creating, Sam argues, swaths of mental illness and a surge in homelessness across the United States.