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

by Sam Quinones

Fentanyl in enormous supplies was opening the drug trade to almost anyone, which is one reason why it created such damage nationwide. Years before, during America’s real-estate bubble in the mid-2000s, people with paltry income and shaky employment, with no steady way of paying for one house, now owned several. Into the industry rushed shyster closing attorneys, corrupt appraisers, banks, and other lenders with no connection to any community. They offered adjustable-rate mortgages to janitors and restaurant workers. For a brief, intoxicated time, lenders got rich and buyers saw a chance to have more than just a home. They bought themselves cars they didn’t need and took dream vacations. It marked the liberation of the nucleus accumbens in its battle with the prefrontal cortex. In the words of one lawyer I spoke with, “There was so much available money and so few impediments to accessing it.” Fentanyl was something like that in the drug world. By 2015, supplies of fentanyl were flooding in from Chinese chemical companies selling on the internet and Mexican traffickers. Like the home-loan industry a decade before, fentanyl took barriers that had kept the unprepared out of the market and replaced them with incentives that enticed them in. It was about as easy for a nobody in the drug business to come by large amounts of the stuff as it had been to own multiple houses during the real-estate bubble. Like the real-estate bubble, illicit fentanyl fit snugly into a part of America...