Why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything? (Part 2) 49:04

Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. This is Surge Engine. This week on the show, part two of us tackling what we thought might be a basic question about fentanyl. The question we're answering, why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in drugs that would not normally be lethal? If you haven't heard part one, please start there. Also, this week's episode, more than last week's, is just not a good one for kids.

Obviously because of the subject matter, but also, if I'm honest, it's just about a kind of darkness that human beings can exhibit to each other that I think is more appropriate for adults. After some ads, Louis. Search Engine is brought to you by Rho. You lose weight, it comes back. You lose it again, it comes back again. If this cycle sounds familiar to you, there's a better, more sustainable way to lose weight. If you've heard of Ozempic or Wigovi, you've probably heard three things. They're effective, but they're expensive, and they're hard to get. That's where Rho comes in.

Thank you.

Go to ro.co slash search engine. Memberships start at just $99 for your first month. Medication costs are separate. That's ro.co slash search engine. Go to ro.co slash safety for black box warning and full safety information. Compounded medication is not required to and does not receive FDA review or approval. Prescription only. ♪♪♪

In March, I went to visit a rehab in East Harlem. This place, it's called Odyssey House. Walking in, we pass a letter board with a message in all caps.

You must be willing to get rid of the life you planned so you can live the life you have. The people here are trying to get sober, from drugs or alcohol. Some of the people here are coming here from prison. We'd spoken to a woman who helps run Odyssey House, and she'd arranged to put us in touch with a few people in the program. She led us downstairs into a small conference room with art on the walls painted by residents.

And then one of those residents walked in, the man we'd spend the morning with. Hi, good morning. Hi, PJ. PJ, what's up, PJ? Okay, let me just get a level. Can I just ask you, this is just so I can get volume levels right, can I ask you what you had for breakfast this morning? I had a banana and orange juice. I'm working on my diet right now. Okay, that sounds pretty good to me. Can you tell me your name and how old you are? My name is Louis. I'm 50 years old.

Louis, a short Latino man with a shaved head. He looked young for 50. I actually talked to a few people before finding Louis, some drug dealers, some drug users, people who had theories about why fentanyl was showing up in the rest of the drug supply. They said things like it might be an accident, people cutting one drug with another added fentanyl by mistake, or another dealer told me he thought greedy street-level dealers were throwing it in there to cover up bad products they'd received. But nobody was sure because none of them had actually touched fentanyl themselves.

Louis was different. He'd used fentanyl, he'd sold fentanyl. And the story of his life, his career in drugs, it helped me understand the logic of the world that was creating this problem. And you're sober now. You were a drug user before? Yes, I'm seven months and two weeks clean today. And when you used drugs, did you sell drugs or did you sell drugs separately? In the beginning of my career, I started off selling drugs.

I was using marijuana. I drank a little bit. And by the age of 14, I was sniffing cocaine. Got it. And what were you, when did you start selling? When I started selling drugs, I was selling crack cocaine. A little bit of heroin, but crack cocaine. And how old were you? I was 13. I was 13 years old. My mother was an addict. So when my mother and my father broke up, which he was also an addict, we were homeless.

So I helped my mother out and helped myself out. I'd sell drugs. My mother would sell illegal numbers. So she would get her money for her addiction. And when you say sold numbers, it was like the sort of underground lottery? Yeah, the illegal lottery. And I sold drugs so that she didn't have to do worse things for her addiction. And so we can eat and have a place to stay. And this is like...

I'm just trying to place this in time. It was in 1985. Got it. And crack was just beginning to become a problem that nobody saw how big it was going to become. I need to tell you about what Lewis's neighborhood was like before crack arrived. His story just doesn't make sense otherwise. Starting in the late 70s, a series of fires tore through the South Bronx, most of them arson. 80% of all housing was lost. People compared what was left to European cities after World War II.

Nowhere urban decay and blight more apparent than in the South Bronx. The home of Ladder 33 and Engine 75 of the 19th Battalion. This clip is from a 1979 local news report called Hell on Earth. It's actually hosted by John Johnson, the famous black documentary producer.

As he narrates, they show footage of what looks like entire city blocks swallowed up in flames. Firemen rushing into the chaos. This is the busiest firehouse in the world. During 1977 and 78, the men of Ladder 33... When I was born and growing up, the Bronx was burning down still. My neighborhood was one building. So we had projects to the left of us, we had projects to the right of us, but everything around my building was a junkyard.

Nearly half a million people were displaced from the South Bronx in this period. In Lewis's neighborhood, one unlikely force of stability was actually the drug dealers. Lewis says that the old-school heroin dealers, they belonged to local crews, not the citywide gangs that would dominate later, which meant that before crack, dealers more often lived in the neighborhoods they sold in. Lewis says despite what their job was and what it did to their neighborhoods, they were

These heroin dealers operated under a code, their version of civic responsibility. So they try to give back. Like, you had the old gangsters in the neighborhood buying school supplies. Entire buildings were getting free turkeys, free turkeys for Thanksgiving. Like, I remember that. Like, I used to get that if the kids needed stuff for school, sneakers, T-shirts, whatever. You know, the big thing about selling drugs when I was selling drugs...

The neighborhood had to look like it wasn't going on.

The old ladies had to be able to sit in front of the building. The kids had to be able to play because once that stopped, now your neighborhood became hot with the police. So if the cops can't drive by and see that the girl's playing double dutch, the kid's playing catch in the street, once that stops, they know your neighborhood is no good. Now they're going to harass you. So the old dealers passed that down. Like I was selling drugs. I was making pretty good money before the addiction got the best of me.

And I was still going to the store for the old ladies in the building. I was still carrying grocery bags because that's what you did in your neighborhood, you know. I was doing it when I was a little boy, so I didn't stop when I became an older man because, you know, these were my mother's friends and stuff like that. So that didn't stop. I didn't smoke a cigarette in front of my building until I was 18. And I shot somebody when I was 13.

That's insane. Listen, when you get a chance, look up 1993, the South Bronx Massacre, Valentine's Day. Tonight, police are trying to crack the case of a Bronx massacre where six people were found shot to death, execution style, in an apartment on Prospect Avenue. Police say that it happened in the... I did look it up, and I found a news clip from the massacre Lewis referenced. You see the reporter doing a stand-up on the street. The South Bronx Massacre. These murders took place in a six-story, red-brick tenement building.

Six people killed, shot face down on a living room floor. Kathy Wolf has been following the story and has details tonight from the 40th Precinct. Kathy? Harry, we are at the 40th Precinct where the investigation is underway. What you said is true. The murder took place about five miles from here at 152nd Street and Prospect Avenue in a neighborhood that is known for violence and drugs. In the video, you see corpses being removed in body bags. Lewis said the killer was a friend of his.

This is a kid that I grew up with since we were little. We sold drugs together. We went dancing, swimming, clubbing. We did everything together. He was months older than me. 21 years old, killed six people on Valentine's Day. This is a kid that he didn't smoke in front of his mother still then because his mother didn't play that. His mother did not play that. But did she understand what his job was? Yeah. But there's certain things you still respect. Take your hat off when you walk in the house. Take your sneakers off. Like...

clean up your room, make your bed, throw out the garbage. You just did it because you were raised that way. In the mix of all of the drama, we still had those rules that applied. To understand it, it's probably going to take so much because none of it makes sense. But to us, it made sense. As long as that old lady could walk around that block and nobody's going to mess with her,

Then I'm doing my job. I'm 15 years old. I'm selling drugs. I got guns on me. I got to worry about the drug addicts coming to rob me. I got to worry about the stick-up kids because you have people that robbed drug dealers as their job, right? The cops come in to either rob us or arrest us, right? And you still had to make your neighborhood look like nothing is going on.

I found these stories remarkable. Lewis is telling of an earlier era of New York City drug dealers who were as polite to old ladies as they were lethal to their rivals. Later, I did run all this by an administrator who's worked in the rehab we're in in this community for years. She was a little skeptical. She said basically that former drug dealers, like all of us, have a tendency to romanticize the past. But for Lewis's part, he says this all happened. And he says he knows it was like this because he remembers when it all went away.

In the mid-80s, in the Bronx and in Harlem, street dealers were switching en masse from heroin to crack. The ensuing crack epidemic, which Lewis would do his part to help inflame, would pretty quickly rewrite the logic that had governed his neighborhood. According to Lewis, this etiquette that had survived during the years of fires and poverty, it would not survive the next chapter. Crack changed all of that.

Crack changed all of that. Whole lot of mothers disappeared. Whole lot of fathers disappeared. You had grandmothers raising kids. Then these kids are making kids. The kid that took over the neighborhood did nothing to earn it. So they didn't respect it the same. When they got it, it's because we left it or we went away or we got murdered. So when they took it, all they knew was that

We were the tough guys of the neighborhood. We were the guys to look up to in the neighborhood. They knew about the things that we did in the neighborhood, so they wanted to mimic that without ever playing a role in the maintenance of the neighborhood. I've read a lot about the war on drugs and on the people who used and sold them. I've read a lot about its unintended consequences. I'd never considered this one. According to the New York Times, when Lewis started dealing in 1985, there were 9,815 people in jail in New York.

Less than four years later, that number had nearly doubled. What was lost may have been a kind of institutional value. This idea that even a drug dealer owed something to their neighborhood. That's Lewis's memory anyway. But what is uncontested by anyone is that crack cocaine did a generation's worth of damage. Through addiction, through crime, through incarceration. It was an old drug administered in a new way. But that was enough to change how people related to each other, how they preyed on each other.

By his own description, Lewis was one of those people who preyed on his neighbors. He says he sold crack to thousands of people. He says he remembers selling crack to pregnant women. He remembers watching one woman take a hit. So skinny, he says he could see her stomach move when the crack hit her system. So high himself that he didn't have a feeling besides just being creeped out. He's not proud of what he's done. He says he wanted to share his story of that era and his role in it because he thought it might help. It might serve as some sort of warning.

He says the best use for his life he can imagine right now is to serve as a bad example. Decades later, the crack era would be over. Lewis would be in prison, upstate, and he'd see a new era begin. A new era in which he'd play the same role, the fentanyl era. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight.

A new school year is starting soon. My partner has two young kids, both of whom use Greenlight. And honestly, it's been kind of great. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely. And parents can keep an eye on kids' new money habits. There's also Greenlight's Infinity Plan, which includes the same access to financial literacy education that makes Greenlight a valuable resource for millions of parents and kids. Plus, built-in safety to give you peace of mind.

There's even a feature that detects car crashes and will connect your young drivers to 911 dispatch and alert emergency contacts if needed. No matter which features make the most sense for your household, Greenlight is the easy, convenient way for parents to raise financially smart kids and for families to navigate life together. Sign up for Greenlight today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com slash search. That's greenlight.com slash search to try Greenlight for free. greenlight.com slash search.

Search Engine is brought to you by Fresh Direct. I do not like going to the grocery store. I go there and my brain turns off and I get lost and I spend much more time than I want to there. Instead, you try Fresh Direct. Fresh Direct is farm to kitchen, food sourced directly from farmers, fishermen, and ranchers and delivered straight to your door. Because of this, I'm paying for the quality of food rather than just to have someone go shopping in a store for me.

Fresh Direct says they're seven days fresher than the grocery store, and I have really seen a huge difference in the freshness of my food. The convenience is unbeatable. I can grocery shop from my office or couch anytime I want. As a person who is lazy but also would like to eat food that is not super low quality, I've been really, really impressed with Fresh Direct. I'm completely dependent on it. For over 20 years, Fresh Direct has been delivering the freshest fruits, vegetables, and meats to the tri-state area. Don't take my word for it. Try it to believe it with 50 bucks off your first order.

Welcome back to the show.

In the late 1990s, as the crack era was waning, Lewis was arrested. He'd do two bids. In 2015, he'd be in prison in Buffalo, New York, where he'd get a front row seat to the beginning of a new era. Can you tell me, do you remember when you first started hearing about fentanyl as a drug? When I first started hearing about fentanyl as a drug, I was in prison.

I was in prison and a lot of people were coming through for the indictments that were happening in upstate New York in the Buffalo area. There were a lot of deaths happening up in the Buffalo area for the Fed. And also the Feds were hitting these drug groups up in Buffalo, New York. I happened to be with some of them that had already caught state charges. And it was making its way to the prisons through these connections.

So, Lewis was introduced to fentanyl by this new class of drug dealers, who'd ended up in prison because they'd sold fentanyl-laced heroin. Local prosecutors were triumphant that these guys had been locked up, but now that they'd been incarcerated, it also meant they could now educate people in Lewis's generation of drug dealers about their new product that was doing so well on the street.

One of the drug war's many ironies is that drugs are very easy to come by in prison. Smuggled in via the guards, smuggled in via inmates. According to one federal survey, over 60% of sentenced inmates are dependent on drugs. And according to a survey done of prisoners in the UK, heroin in particular is a drug people try for the first time while incarcerated. Have you experienced either heroin or fentanyl? I've done heroin. I've done heroin in prison.

I can tell you, December 25th, 1998, my first time in prison as an adult. My first Christmas, a friend offered it to me, and I did it. And I did it. I felt uncomfortable at first. Got nauseous, stuff like that. But after a couple of hours, some coffee, some cigarettes, I wasn't even in prison anymore. And honestly, in the 18 years that I've done in prison, it was guaranteed to take me out of there. So I was free. So I do everyone to not be in prison anymore.

Even though I was physically in it, I was gone. So yeah, I had a love for heroin. If there's any drug that I truly loved the feeling, it would be heroin. And as far as fentanyl, I've done it about two times, three times. And I was using Suboxone at the time in prison. And Suboxone refreshment, it's supposed to make it so you don't get high from opiates, right? Yeah. It's a blocker. So right now, if I'm on Suboxone,

I can't take heroin. It won't let it, like the drug will still be in my system, but it won't let me experience the feeling. Fentanyl goes right through that, right through that. So did you make the choice where you're like, I'm going to take fentanyl on purpose? I wanted to experience it. I wanted to know what I was selling. Actually, before I ever sold the bag of it, that night when I got it in my hand, I tried it. And what was it like? It hit me faster than heroin ever did.

I gave my friend some, I don't know if you know what a roll-up cigarette is. It's tobacco, and then you put it in the rolling paper, and you roll it like a joint, right? So I'm watching out for him while he tries it. I wanted to see. And he sniffed twice, took two bumps. By the time he rolled the cigarette, his whole voice changed. I thought he was faking it. It takes seconds to roll a cigarette. I thought he was faking it when I looked at him. He was sweating. His face was droopy. I'm like, man, stop playing. I thought he was kidding.

And he was stoned out of his mind. He had not done fentanyl. He was locked up before it started, like me. So he was doing suboxone like me. This thing put him on his ass, like, immediately. So I wanted to try it because it was my turn. I took a bump or two by the time I rolled my cigarette. I was already leaning immediately. As I tasted it, I got stoned that fast. For a person that's addicted to heroin, why not love that?

And did it feel like, did it feel like the same as a heroin high, just faster? It was faster. It was faster. And I could honestly say it was, it was more intense, a whole lot more intense in an uncomfortable way. I did it before 12 o'clock at night. And I could honestly say for the wake up call in the morning, I was still stoned out of my mind. That whole day was uncomfortable until it came down and then it felt good.

And so you said you wanted to try it because you wanted to know what you were selling. Were you selling fentanyl in prison? Yeah. I sold fentanyl in prison. I made a lot of money in prison off of fentanyl, and I helped my family from the sale of fentanyl. It's big today in prison. You have people taking care of families off of this thing, even in prison.

You first hear about it in prison. It's like a new thing. Were you scared of it? What was your feeling about the drug besides that it was new? I guess at that point, it was worrisome because you always think, who am I going to know that's going to die from that? My whole neighborhood in the Bronx was flooded with drugs. I have a daughter who lives upstate. That area is flooded with the drug and Buffalo's right down the street. When I was selling it,

It kind of freaked me out. That same fentanyl-laced heroin was killing people in the street. I think at that point, you got the people that don't care, and they're going to give it to you as strong as they can get it. To the point right now where maybe a year ago, they were cutting the fentanyl with the heroin instead of the other way around. What Lewis is saying is that in Buffalo, in prison, he was seeing the same thing happen that Ben Westhoff, the journalist from Part One, had been hearing reports of happening nationally.

People who had been addicted to heroin had gotten addicted to fentanyl-based heroin and then addicted to just fentanyl. At first, they were using the fentanyl to boost up the heroin. Yeah. Then it became where they were cutting the fentanyl with heroin because the heroin wasn't as potent. So what they were doing is they're giving you the taste of it

And kind of making the fentanyl not as strong by cutting it with the heroin. And is this people, and in this case, it's dealers who are selling to addicts who are coming and wanting fentanyl. And they're getting, instead of buying heroin that has fentanyl, they're buying fentanyl that has heroin. Yeah, right now, what's happening in the street is they sell straight fentanyl now. They started selling straight fentanyl. And because people didn't want, like, why even waste time getting anything laced with heroin?

It's crazy, right? Laced with heroin when they could just get fed. Laced with heroin as a phrase is insane. Yeah, yeah, but this is what's going on. Like, you go to some of these streets, like, right now, probably not too far from here, like around the corner, and they're selling caps of fentanyl or bags of fentanyl. It's not even heroin anymore. People are buying fentanyl.

The only problem with fentanyl was that once you got a good amount of it in your system for a certain length of time, it doesn't have any legs. So where I could shoot up a bag of dope and be okay for like an hour or two, fentanyl is going to take me higher, faster, but it's gone in 15 minutes. That's why the fentanyl addicts are chasing it so much more because you got to use more to keep that feeling.

Very few of the things that other human beings do in life are actually senseless. What can look insane or evil or random is often someone following the rules of a world that are just different than yours. Lewis learned one set of rules growing up as a 13-year-old crack dealer in the South Bronx. Protect your turf with violence, sell to junkies, never smoke a cigarette in front of an old lady. Later, as a user himself, he learned a new set of rules.

Pursue the greatest high. The more you've lost, the less you have to lose. Lewis was telling me things that I'd already heard Ben Westhoff say, facts that had been reported, but those facts hadn't made sense divorced from the world that had created them. Now they did. Heroin users avoided fentanyl at first because they'd heard it was deadly, but the ones who survived had pursued fentanyl because it offered a stronger high. And from Lewis, another fact Ben had reported seemed more real to me now.

that eventually, overdose deaths from heroin-laced fentanyl didn't serve as a warning to the survivors. They served as an enticement.

And also the fact that it was dropping so many people made more heroin addicts want to gravitate to whoever was selling that bag that was doing this to people so they could get as high as they possibly could. So this is something that I've heard from other people, and it sounds like you're saying it's true as well, that for addicts, if they hear that someone overdosed off of a drug, that can be kind of an advertisement for that drug. It's definitely an advertisement for

Um, the heroin addict, the people that are addicted to opiates, the high that they're looking for is to be as so far gone as they can be. Because you feel like absolutely no pain. It's not like with cocaine where you're going to tweak and twitch. The opiate is actually going to put you in like a euphoric state where everything that you love, you crave, be it from sexual desires to the love of your parents, the love of your kids, it gives you all of that sensation.

And if they see people are passing out from it, they know those people have gone to the highest peak and they want to go there. And so in that, if someone's in that mindset, even an overdose death, that can be, it's like, okay, well, that drug got that person very, very high. And then are they making the calculation that they will just be able to use it in a way where they won't die? The people that are that addicted, I don't think it matters if they do die or not. Because what a way to go, right? Yeah.

feeling the best way you could ever possibly feel. It's like heaven on earth before you even get there. It's a risk they take. I think that the scariest part of addiction for somebody outside of looking in or even a person that's fighting the addiction that we sacrificed everything for that one thing. For that one thing, we gave away family, we gave away friends, everything that we worked for, everything that we wanted, things that we hadn't even got yet that we could have achieved and accomplished.

We gave it away for that one feeling, even if it was just for a moment. And it's scary that people are willing to die to have that, just not to feel life. Some people don't want to live this life, and they'd rather hide, cover themselves up in that blanket of the drug, and how do you fight the most pleasurable thing you ever had? After a short break, Lewis gives me an answer to the question that brought us here, an answer based on the logic of the world that he used to inhabit. ♪

Search Engine is brought to you by Betterment. Do you want your money to be motivated? Do you want your money to rise and grind? Do you think your money should get up and work? Don't worry, Betterment is here to help. Betterment is the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle.

Their automated technology is built to help maximize returns, meaning when you invest with Betterment, your money can auto-adjust as you get closer to your goal, rebalance if your portfolio gets too far out of line, and your dividends are automatically reinvested. That can increase the potential for compound returns. In other words, your money is working like a dog while you can be sleeping like one and snoring like one too.

You'll never picture your money the same way again. Betterment, the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle. Visit betterment.com to get started. Investing involves risk. Performance is not guaranteed. Search Engine is brought to you by Mint Mobile. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you bump on repeat and you have to share it with your friends so they can experience just how awesome it is?

That's kind of what it feels like to discover that Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for $15 a month when you purchase a three-month plan. It's such an awesome deal, there's no way you can keep it to yourself. Friends don't let friends overpay for wireless. Say bye-bye to your overpriced wireless plan and switch to Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you and your squad with premium wireless plans starting at $15 a month. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.

Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile's deal and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash search. That's mintmobile.com slash search. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash search.

$45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Welcome back to the show. So I want to say the most common theory I've encountered for fentanyl showing up in non-opioid drugs like cocaine is that it probably happens by accident.

The image that's often provided is like an inexperienced street-level dealer mixing a bunch of drugs on a table, and then they just like bump a pile. Or maybe a drug scale used to weigh fentanyl is then used to weigh cocaine without being cleaned. Anything is possible. This show abhors certainty. The problem is I have not heard firsthand accounts of that happening from drug dealers. And when I asked Lewis what he thought, he said he does not believe this is an accident.

He believes this kind of adulteration is just a new version of an old dealer tactic, something he said he used to see back in his day as a street-level crack dealer. This used to happen back in the day in Harlem. Like, you could read about this. What people do is people will lace cocaine with heroin. So now, same difference. You're going to keep coming for my cocaine.

because my cocaine is the one that's making you feel the way you want to feel because you like it better than anybody else's cocaine. And what it is, you're speedballing and you don't even know it. The people that actually like that feeling, they could only get that feeling from me. And they don't even know why. Where they think it's my coke, it's that I'm cutting it with a little bit of heroin because I want you to consistently come to me, so I'm hooking you to dope. Because once I see that you're just coming to me, coming to me, coming to me, I got you.

And I didn't hook you with the coke. I hooked you with the dope, which is what I wanted to begin with. Eventually, I'm selling you bags of dope. And the experience that they will have, they won't think, oh, I just took cocaine and it's really different. They'll think, like, I took cocaine and it's a little bit better. It's almost like you're describing, like, this is like a stupid analogy, but it's like how restaurants use a lot of salt in the food or something. Put it like this. The people that do like it,

They're going to stay liking it. You're going to have the people that maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable and they won't like your Coke. But the ones that do is going to take a short amount of time before even they realize that, you know, this is the only Coke that's going to get me there. And then you start selling them dope too. You start selling them dope too. Some of them are going to say no for a long time. But then, you know, some of them are not. I found an article from 1989 describing the same phenomenon that Lewis is talking about.

It's from this piece by an LA Times reporter in New York, filing from the front lines of the crack epidemic. The piece is called "Smokable Cocaine Heroin Mixture Seen as Spreading Lethal Addiction." The reporter describes this new innovation among drug dealers. They're selling users product they claim is crack that's been secretly dusted with heroin. The reporter interviews Robert, a 24-year-old in a New York rehab center not very different from the one we're in now. It's just decades in the past.

According to the piece, quote, End quote. Robert did love it.

The reporter talks to a different crack cocaine user named Warner. The piece describes how good this new combination of upper and downer feels to Warner. Quote, End quote.

This story, combined with Lewis's, they help answer a question that had really confused me. Why on earth would a dealer use an opiate as an adulterate in a non-opiate drug? Turns out, for some users, it makes it feel better. And it makes it more addictive. Opiates and opioids offer strong physical withdrawals, which could produce more returning customers.

Lewis said this idea could even apply to something like cannabis. He laid out a scenario of why someone selling cannabis might want to adulterate it with fentanyl. Right now I'm selling weed. I got weed. Everybody's got weed. But now if I put a little bit of fentanyl in my weed, I'm going to get you stoned different. Right? I'm going to get you stoned different. So what ends up happening is...

I'll go to this guy and buy weed. And it's going to get me high, but it's not going to get me high like the weed with the fentanyl. I don't know it has fentanyl in it, but I know it makes me feel better. It's a higher, it's a higher high. So I try that other guy. I'll get stoned, but I'm not going to get stoned like this. You're going to come back because you want to get this stoned. And then what happens is you're going to do it and keep buying the weed from this one guy and you're getting hooked to the fentanyl.

And then later on, you're a customer that he's going to push it on to. Because he knows what's bringing the people back, especially these kids, is that they're getting hooked to the fentanyl. They don't even know it. I want to put a caveat here. There's a community of activists and experts online who argue for decriminalization of all sorts of illicit drugs. Honestly, I'm pretty sympathetic to their politics.

Some of them have dismissed reports of fentanyl showing up in cannabis as just fear-mongering. Fear-mongering by law enforcement, amplified by credulous journalists. Some say that fentanyl is not mixed in cannabis because it wouldn't make economic sense for dealers, and that also it's chemically unlikely in some cases. Fentanyl degrades in heat more easily than cannabis, so lighting up a joint specifically would provide more heat than you'd want for smoking fentanyl.

But the problem for me is that Lewis is a former drug dealer, and he says in his experience, cannabis does get adulterated. Two other patients we spoke to at the rehab said the same thing, that dealers are putting fentanyl in cannabis because they want to trick people into using a version of their preferred drug that offers opiate-style withdrawal and opiate-style addiction.

I do not want to suggest that cannabis is a drug that people should generally be afraid of. Cannabis, compared to a lot of other drugs, is pretty safe. It might make you appreciate jam bands more. But to say categorically that fentanyl would never appear in cannabis feels reckless to me. Dealers interviewed by the New York Times have talked about spraying cannabis with fentanyl. And we found a couple cases from DrugsData.org where people had asked for their loose cannabis to be tested, and it had come back fentanyl-positive.

That's the context I have. But I did push Lewis a bit more here on the logic of a choice like this by a dealer, which I do still find strange. Part of what surprised me about that is like, I've never taken opiates. I've taken other drugs. I always assumed that if I smoked weed laced with fentanyl, I would notice because fentanyl is such a strong drug. If you put it in small, small quantity,

which is still strong. It's really just giving the weed a boost, but what it's doing to the body is a little bit different. But what about somebody who's selling like cocaine who has a drug overdose? I don't know if you've known, you can look this up, about 70% of the overdoses that have been going on, let's say, all night at county were cocaine-laced fentanyl. And I'm talking about this was a few months ago.

More than half of the overdoses are coming from that. And why are they doing that? Because people will shine away from just buying the fentanyl. So these people that are still doing the cocaine, you've got drug dealers still willing to do that tactic to try to reel these people in. So they were killing all of these cocaine addicts. They didn't know that they were doing that.

I checked Lewis's numbers. He's pretty close. 70% of overdose deaths in Oneida County last year involved fentanyl. The majority of those deaths involved cocaine and meth with fentanyl, although fentanyl showed up in other non-opiate drugs too. In one particular case, seven people overdosed in seven days after smoking a synthetic form of cannabis that had been tainted with fentanyl. When Lewis sees those stories in the newspaper, he doesn't really have questions about them.

He sees an old logic that he recognizes. For me, this is as close to a truly satisfying answer as I expect to get on this. Fentanyl, invented as a hospital painkiller in Belgium, was later formulated in small labs in China. It found a new customer base among opioid-addicted Americans. It snuck into the heroin supply first, then heroin users had begun to ask for it by name. And now, it adulterates many other drugs in the illicit market.

These days, fentanyl adulteration, at least in some cases, is an intentional choice by drug dealers who are willing to risk some customers' lives in order to create new opioid users. Obviously, of course, this is an underground economy. No one sees all of it. We will never know for sure if any given case is an accident or if it's greed. But to Lewis, who once sold the kinds of drugs people die from or ruin their lives for, this news story is really an old one.

The ugliness of the crack era happening again, except everywhere this time, not just in the cities. When crack came, it was a totally big change. Now we're going back to the 60s and 50s with the heroin, except with these new designer drugs, with the mentality of the 1986 crack era.

It's crazy. Do you see fentanyl as like a drug of this era, like a highly deadly drug that you can cut into lots of other stuff, like a drug that exemplifies even among people who may have done things that hurt other people, like a drug that exists in a world where people care much less about other people than they might have? I think fentanyl itself is a perfect example of the way the street has become, the example of how far down the rabbit hole people

Even criminals have gone. Addiction has become. There's no consciousness to it at all. Not to the person selling it, not to the person doing it. It's not a white thing. It's not a black thing. It's not a Latino thing. It's just a thing now. Doesn't matter the neighborhood. Doesn't matter none of that. It's the new wave. Get as high as you can, as fast as you can, and to hell with everybody else. And it's sad right now.

Walk out the building, make a right, you're going to see people twisted out of their mind to the left or for that K2. And they lacing that with fentanyl too. The fake weed, they lacing that with fentanyl. Because, I mean, like, why not? Why not? I won't even buy a loose cigarette in the store today. Really? No, I won't. I won't. I won't do it. I'd rather not smoke or I'll get a smoke from a friend. I cannot buy a loose cigarette. Because you're worried they would lace a loose cigarette, like a bodega guy would lace a loose cigarette. Like, why not? Why not? Why not?

It's already open pack. It's already illegal. Half of these places are surrounded by drugs. Like, why not? It's not like I ain't sell drugs in these stores. It's not like some of these people didn't supply me in one way or another. Like, so why not? It's just another hustle. Why not get in on it? Think about it. Back in the day, you used to dip the cigarettes in the angel dust.

Why not do it to the fentanyl and sell it like that for the people that want to smoke it? Let me get a $10 cigarette. It's a fentanyl stick, you know what I mean? Lewis's lifetime as a drug dealer has left him with an outlook of earned paranoia. An understanding that there are people in this world who might poison you to make a buck. And that those people might be hard for any of us to recognize. But to Lewis, today, what's most important is turning the page.

When we met him, it was March. He'd been sober seven months and two weeks. That's what he was focusing on, recovery, on not being the person he used to be. A big part of my life, I believe, is beginning now because I could honestly say for the first time, it's not just about not getting high. It's about changing the mentality that always goes back to getting high. My focus right now for when I leave here is to try to reach as many kids as possible. And...

Like, I don't lie to them. Even to the kids up here, I don't lie to them. If my story's ugly, I'm going to tell them how ugly it is. I've got three daughters. Just like I've had to tell my daughters, you don't want to be with a man like me. You don't want to get caught up with somebody with the mentality that I have. And this was while I was still thinking those ways because I didn't want a man like me for my daughter. And that's sad that I couldn't be anything but a bad example with the hopes that they don't follow me.

So if I could take that bad example and give it to these kids and let them know what's coming, because I've been there, then I could balance out some of the negative that I've done through my life. What do I want right now for my life? I want to make it worth something. And the only way I could do that is to stay clean and help people stay away from my tracks. With that, I'm finished. Thank you.

Yes, sir. I appreciate you guys. Please, man, put that out there. People need to hear this. A few months after we talked to Lewis, we reached out again to run him through this story prior to publication. The people at his rehab, Odyssey House, told us that he completed treatment shortly after we'd first spoken to him. He's out of rehab and back in the world now, out here with the rest of us. That's our show this week, but stick around after the break for some resources on how to stay safe. ♪

Welcome back to the show. So we mentioned this last week, but in case people are listening to this episode as its own discreet thing, here's some resources. We're going to be talking about

If you use illicit drugs, or if your friends do, you should go to dancesafe.org. You go to their website, you can buy fentanyl test strips. We have put a link to both the site and a video for how to use these strips in our newsletter, but it's very easy. You take a small amount of the substance you want to test, you dilute it in water, you dip the strip, and then you look for a line, like a COVID test.

The other website we mentioned last week, which I will reiterate, is drugsdata.org. This is like an offshoot of Arrowhead, if you're familiar with that website. But people send in their illicit drugs, the organization tests them, and then they say what's in the drugs. And what's interesting about this website is you can use it to sort of see what is generally happening in the illicit market, which is usually an ocean of question marks. So looking today, I see that in Washington, a lot of people are testing MDMA and they're

It looks like it's actually MDMA. So those are two websites you can check out. Also, Odyssey House, the rehab that connected us to Lewis, their website is odysseyhousenyc.org. They do inpatient rehab, medication-assistant treatment, harm reduction services, and outpatient services. Their admissions hotline is 866-888-7880.

And as always, if you have a question for us, you can leave a comment on the newsletter at pjvote.com or email me directly at pjvote85 at gmail.com. We are not publishing an episode next week, but we will be back the week after. As always, you can find our schedule for the year on the About page of our newsletter, pjvote.com.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me and Shruthi Pinamaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme and sound design by Armin Bizarrian. Fact-checking by Sean Merchant. Our executive producers at Odyssey are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis.

Thank you to the folks at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And thanks to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clouser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosemam at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC.

Special thanks to Isabel, Jay, and Kenny from Odyssey House. And a big thank you to reporter Sarah Maslanier. Her fentanyl reporting is excellent. We will have some links in the newsletter. And also thanks to Zach Siegel. He has a newsletter about the drug war called Substance that's worth checking out. He also has a totally different theory about why fentanyl is adulterated into drugs like cocaine. And you can read about it on his newsletter.

Follow and listen to Search Engine with me, PJ Vogt, now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We will see you in two weeks.