Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic by Ben Westhoff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What Marx Never Considered

The war on drugs is a war on global capitalism. Few want to make the connection, largely, I think, because it would make clear the futility of the effort. Westhoff sees how drugs and capitalism are related: “More than anything, this is a story of global capitalism run amok... if global capitalism is hard to control, the new-drugs trade is nearly impossible,” he says. But Westhoff then proceeds as if there were some hope in dealing with drug use as a problem of law and public health policy. Control is not almost but entirely impossible according to his own analysis. Drug use is not a disease; it is a part of the larger ideology of capitalism. Like all ideologies, drugs have their own logic which is impervious to external criticism or internal correction.

Westhoff’s title accurately represents the issue. The remarkable spread of opioid use in the last 20 years - not just opioids but a plethora of recreational highs - has been fuelled not by consumer demand or cultural deterioration but by corporate resources. Synthetic drug development is a component of the worldwide corporate economy as important as computer and communications technology. From basic innovation, through commercial development, to global distribution, the patterns of corporate actions and reactions are identical in the two industries.

Synthetic drugs are not sourced by uneducated and oppressed farmers in Pakistan or Columbia. They originate in corporate laboratories. They are chemical inventions initially requiring advanced knowledge to create. Competition is fierce, both to be the low cost producer, and to eliminate or evade the regulatory restrictions. With patent protection largely unavailable, continuous invention is essential. It takes organisational skill not criminal muscle to participate in this market successfully. Scientific research, legal expertise, and political lobbying as well as an acute feel for the market must be finely coordinated to ensure staying ahead of the commercial curve.

The Sackler family pioneered the mass opioid revolution with the development and marketing of its now notorious OxyContin. But OxyContin is only the pharmaceutical equivalent of the Model T Ford - first off the high volume production line but technologically rather primitive. An international industry has sprouted which now produces an extensive line of high-tech synthetic products. Consumer choice has never been greater. Just as ‘any colour as long as it’s black’ was archaic almost as soon as Henry Ford uttered it, so drug design has become far more sophisticated than even the Sacklers had imagined. They have been left in the corporate dust by smaller, more nimble, more creative producers - just as IBM had been leapfrogged by Microsoft and Apple.

In the designer drug business, just as in any high-tech enterprise, the genius in the garage has the innovative edge over the established producer. This is an implicit principle of capitalism. It is what keeps capitalism alive. And like an Ayn Rand protagonist, if the genius can’t get his bureaucratic colleagues in industry or academia to support him, there is no need to stick around. The entrepreneurial spirit is nowhere better demonstrated than in the start-up of a promising new line of untested compounds. So-called ‘psychonauts,’ the avant-garde of the drug community, abound as volunteers for commercial Beta-testing. Risk of death is considered part of the fun.

Apparently there is plenty of unused garage space in places like China. The chemistry of psychoactive substances is, although few seem to notice, a matter of intellectual capital. It is knowledge that can be located anywhere, and transferred instantaneously anywhere else. Once a compound’s chemical composition and physical effects are known, large scale production is simpler than making bathtub gin during Prohibition or old-fashioned moonshine in the mountains. Formulas, recipes, and manufacturing techniques aren’t subject to customs inspections. Patent infringements are hardly a worry in a world of unrestricted trade under the table. Advertising is unnecessary, and there is no such thing as bad product placement: “If addicts find something that killed somebody, they flock to it,”

The laws directed toward restriction of the designer drug market are either stupid and ill-informed (Ecstasy), often unenforceable or producing paradoxical effects (criminalisation of analogues) or hopelessly naive (banning ‘how-to’ cookbooks). Lab-based drugs, unlike plant-based ones, don’t have a material supply chain that can be interrupted. Distribution can be controlled locally in a sort of guerilla-organisation which is highly mobile. Transactions are handled through the untraceable dark net in crypto-currency.

In short, the synthetic drug industry is unstoppable. Either attempts to control it will consume an unacceptably large amount of resources; or it continues to expand uncontrollably based on good commercial logic. Or both. This is capitalism threatening capitalism in a way Karl Marx never considered. He also never considered that socialism would take the same corporate form as capitalism. No one has yet come up with an alternative to our current ideology of corporate economy. Perhaps that must wait until the drug crisis becomes more pressing. Meanwhile we all tread water in a deepening pool of synthetic happiness.

Postscript: this article appeared in my newsfeed five minutes after posting this review: https://apple.news/A25KW860CQQGu8pIrj...

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