The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

by Sam Quinones

The other question arose: Why would dealers want to sell a substance so powerful that it killed their customers? Individually, they probably didn’t. But the power of free-market competition took hold. Anybody could procure fentanyl as easily as one of those home loans a decade earlier. It was more potent than any street drug before it. Anybody selling drugs that didn’t include the powerful boost of fentanyl wasn’t going to have customers for long. Dealers didn’t dare not mix it in. About the only way to introduce caution regarding fentanyl into the street drug world is for district attorneys to charge with murder those who sell anything containing fentanyl that ends up killing a user. Fearing they will “catch a body,” dealers back off. Soon, fentanyl became a market-expansion tool. Even a casual user of cocaine or meth, once those drugs were laced with fentanyl, would soon be a fentanyl addict—and thus a daily customer. “They don’t want fentanyl,” said Richard Mason, chief operations officer at House of Hope in Columbus, Ohio. “But they get their meth or cocaine cut with fentanyl without knowing it, and they love the high and they go back for more. I don’t think our clients at first were seeking fentanyl. Now they’re just straight-up fentanyl addicts.” In the 1980s, Latin American heroin came in stronger and cheaper and outcompeted the heroin that for decades had been coming from the Far East. By the early 1990s, no Far Eastern heroin was for sale in America. That’s what f...