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

by Sam Quinones

Could the professor develop a test for the presence of fentanyl in a horse? Actually, the director used the term “elephant juice,” as the drug was called in the racing world, since it reputedly could stop an elephant. Hovering at the edges of the racing industry, the director explained, was a shady class of people constantly looking for chemicals that could “hop a horse or stop a horse”—make it run faster, or slower. Fentanyl, he said, did the former. The drug was a narcotic when administered to humans; it doped them, slowed them, sent them into a stupor. But it threw horses into a manic rage—cats, too, for that matter. Opioids, in fact, tend to produce strange effects in mammals other than humans. Fentanyl will turn a rat stiff, to the point where you can stand him on his head. A horse on fentanyl will tear up a stall. On the track, the drug pushed the horse to extremes.