Overview
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that can be prescribed for severe pain after surgery or as a result of advanced cancer, and pharmaceutical versions come in patches, lozenges, injections, and nasal sprays. It’s considered to be 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and heroin.
History and Etymology
The precursor chemicals for fentanyl are manufactured primarily by industrial chemical and pharmaceutical companies in China and India. This means that, through either active complicity or willful ignorance, these companies are doing business with illicit brokers and manufacturers who will turn the legitimate precursors into the final product we call fentanyl. I hesitate to cite fiction for something this complicated, but Breaking Bad does a decent job showing how street level substance use is downstream of the incentives of bigger players at the scale of international trade networks. The global commerce industry is too large and fast for any regulatory regime at customs and ports to fully manage, and cartels can easily exploit blindspots when enforcement mechanisms can only inspect a tiny fraction of overall trade. I hesitate to cite fiction again, but The Wire also does a good job tying the street level economics of dealing drugs to port management and international trade networks, including an interesting intersection of automation replacing human workers and potentially interfering with cartel networks as a result. Machines can’t be bribed, intimidated, or incentivized to turn a blind eye. To cite one last work of fiction, The Sopranos has a scene where Tony works himself up after seeing a news segment that showed how easy it would be for terrorists to smuggle illicit goods or plant explosives, and it pushes him to begin cooperating with the FBI under a loose concept of nationalist unification. Media in the early 2000s seemed ripe for commentary on the international drug trade amidst the idea that global corporatism was coming to swallow up “the little guy.”