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

by Sam Quinones

In 1974 Janssen scientists synthesized a molecule with an entirely new level of efficiency in reaching the brain. They called it carfentanil. Carfentanil was ten thousand times more potent than morphine. It had no valid use on humans, they believed, but they saw that it sedated elephants, rhinoceroses, and other large mammals. In the United States, later, carfentanil was made legal only for zoo veterinarians to possess. (UK scientists concluded that in 2002 the Russian government used carfentanil to attack Chechen rebels who had taken over a Moscow theater, dispersing it through the building’s air duct. At least 170 people died, including 121 hostages. The UK scientists based their conclusions on tests of items of clothing and blood belonging to British citizens who were near an exit and thus among the hostages revived by a Russian assault team that day. The Russian government has never commented on what it pumped through the theater beyond to say that it was a “mixture based on derivatives of fentanyl.”) Paul Janssen proved that once fentanyl was invented, it wasn’t difficult to replicate. Making fentanyl got easier as years passed. An anonymous chemist, known today only as Siegfried, published a simpler method, in English, for making fentanyl—with five chemical steps compared to Janssen’s seven. The method fits on a single sheet of paper and appears on a rudimentary website of the kind common to the internet’s early days. No one seems to know who Siegfried is or was, or ...