We Bought Everything Needed to Make $3 Million Worth of Fentanyl. All It Took Was $3,600 and a Web Browser.

At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers operating through representatives with generic names like “Jenny” will air-ship fentanyl ingredients, also known as precursors, door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough of these chemicals to make 3 million pills. This stellar investigation reveals how drug traffickers are skillfully eluding government efforts to halt the deadly trade fueling the fentanyl crisis, now the top killer of Americans aged 18 to 45:

Reuters couldn’t determine whether any of the Chinese suppliers were the actual manufacturers of the chemicals received or simply middlemen. Nor could the news organization determine where the operations were located. Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.

The address listed in a government database for a precursor seller known as Hubei Amarvel Biotech, for example, led to a Wuhan office tower. A visit to the listed room number showed another company occupying that space, while the building’s management told Reuters that the chemical supplier had never rented space there.

Amarvel is the operation that sales agent Jenny worked for. It is one of three Chinese suppliers that sold Reuters precursors after having been indicted last year by U.S. federal prosecutors. The Justice Department accused Amarvel of exporting “vast quantities” of chemicals used to make fentanyl and similar drugs. Two Amarvel suspects—Wang Qingzhou and Chen Yiyi—are in jail awaiting trial in New York. They have pleaded not guilty. A third, unidentified suspect remains at large.

Wang’s attorney, Leonardo Aldridge, and Chen’s attorney, Marlon Kirton, declined to comment.

A Mexico-based Reuters reporter initially contacted Amarvel via Telegram in July 2023 to inquire about fentanyl precursors, a few weeks after the grand jury indictment was unsealed in New York. Sales agent Jenny denounced U.S. drug policy and the case against the company.

“What we sell is completely legal in China, but the United States always uses this matter to criticize us, and they even pose as buyers to get our information and slander our country,” Jenny wrote in Spanish. “I hate all Americans, they use it (fentanyl) themselves and blame us.”

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/aWg8I3S

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/M29haQz

Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps

Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying on the hand-drawn maps of locals and strangers to find his way. The result is a lovely essay accompanied by Buckland’s own photographs on serendipity, unexpectedness, living in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes.

This teaches me something unexpected about maps. I was asking people how to get somewhere. But more often than not, what they illustrate were the things to which they pay attention. For these farmers, what is important is the number of doors on the cowshed and the limits to the valley they call home.

Later that day in a cafe in Château d’Oex, I talk to Charlotte, the retired schoolteacher sitting next to me. She orders ice cream for lunch. “I have watched my weight for 60 years and now I don’t care anymore,” she says.

Her map includes the number of meters I’ll need to climb and descend to reach the next valley. She remembers them exactly because she once ran over these passes.

Our attention is a gift. Reading maps is an act of empathy. They tell us as much about the person who made them as they do about the world.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/G0DF6Ha

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/M29haQz

It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil

“The weird thing about growing up in oil country was that I had no idea I was growing up in oil country,” writes Jonathan Blake at the outset of this fascinating piece about Los Angeles’ still-active oil industry. Many have seen the wells near Baldwin Hills—it’s tough to miss them when driving down La Cienega—but fewer are aware of how drilling fields persist a century after the original oil boom, particularly in urban residential settings.

A synagogue with the facade of a theater, a school with the facade of a Brooklyn house, an oil drilling operation with the facade of a synagogue: uncanny architecture that gives no hint of the buildings’ actual uses. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that there is active oil drilling just 125 feet from people’s homes, according to the environmental justice group STAND-L.A., a distance that seemed generous to me when I visited recently. Apartments abut the alleyway behind the tower. Some residents have windows that look onto its ivy-covered walls. Without leaving their homes, neighbors could easily read the number for the emergency hotline on the sign by the door to report a leak. 

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/zLea1iv

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/M29haQz

The War Over Safe Drug Supply in Vancouver

At one time, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver had a drug overdose rate of 25 times the national average due to the unpredictable composition of street drugs sometimes laced with lethal amounts of fentanyl and carfentanil. Activists Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicums believe that harm reduction via safe supply is the only way to save lives. So, the pair founded the Drug User Liberation Front. At first, they bought cocaine and opium on the dark web with their own money and gave the drugs away for free. Later, they started a group called the compassion club geared toward safe access to drugs.

This is how the compassion club worked: first, Nyx and Kalicum converted crowdfunded Canadian dollars to Bitcoin, then traded that for Monero, an untraceable cryptocurrency. They used private browsers to access the dark web and, for extra security, operated on private servers, which encrypted their IP addresses. To find online drug vendors, they searched discussion boards where people posted tests of substances they received. Careful to avoid international shipments, they only bought from Canadian vendors with good reviews. After selecting one, they’d order a small amount to confirm its purity. If a sample wasn’t received—or if they got a bad product—they could get a refund. Communication was limited to ordering and address details; the goods were delivered by Canada Post.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/HgPlQSN

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/M29haQz

My Mother, the Gambler

From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart.

At least I had my mother’s nose, and, more important, I had inherited her belief in magic. Both of us understood that in order to survive it was necessary to arrange things in a certain way. You had to take life’s terrifying unpredictabilities and rally them, by ritual or formula, into an army that would do your bidding.

There was a period of several months when I kept suggesting my mother play the same three numbers. Seven, one, four. Something about that arrangement seemed friendly, not to mention that the numbers added up to twelve, which, when added again—one plus two—gave you three, meaning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I saw no sacrilege in this reference to the Trinity. Gambling, I sensed, was a kind of prayer—though my mother didn’t always direct these prayers toward God. Sometimes she invoked the dead, playing the birth date of a deceased relative, often her grandmother. Such bets were akin to lighting candles in church, which you had to pay for, too. Both transactions were a request to be remembered by Heaven—to be helped, or saved.

Read the essay

from Longreads https://ift.tt/na2Ke1l

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/gqOAbcn

Fear as a Game

From scary movies to roller coasters to extreme sports, there are ways we can scare ourselves—for fun. Why do some people enjoy uncertain, risky, or dangerous situations? In this Believer essay, Elisa Gabbert reflects on her fear of heights, and also explores fear as pleasure, the philosophy of games, and anxiety as a luxury.

I collect this kind of story, the kind that reveals a crack in reality. They give me that skin-tingling feeling, a flutter in the chest. We tell ourselves that roller coasters are perfectly safe and that planes don’t crash. I don’t want it not to be true; I don’t want to die on a plane. So why do I like the stories? It’s like I want my sense of reality to be destabilized. It’s like I’m playing some kind of game, a game in which the complex world falls away and I focus on a single threat. A single strange-but-very-real threat. I can stop riding roller coasters, obviously, but it’s harder to avoid planes or other forms of transportation. Trains do get derailed. Bridges do collapse. So the threats are very real—but not immediate. Not for me, when I’m reading the news, when I’m sitting at my desk.

Is there anything useful about that feeling, I wonder? That artificial fear, or fear at a distance? Might practicing fear be a good idea? It seems more useful than anxiety—if anxiety is just the brain burning energy it doesn’t really need, because you’re not currently starving, or trying to outrun a lion. These may be just concepts, words I attach to agitation, but when I call the feeling anxiety, I’m mapping it alongside paralysis and existential dread. I associate anxiety with stasis, with insomnia, lying supine in bed. Fear, on the contrary, is a vertical feeling. It’s activating. If I’m scared, I want to be moving.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/QjWyKAV

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/gqOAbcn

Universal Mother

For Granta, Momtaza Mehri reflects on the life and legacy of Sinéad O’Connor, on the first anniversary of the singer songwriter’s death.

I suppose that’s why I’ve always been in awe of O’Connor as a musician and a daughter. In publicly exorcising the mother-daughter relationship, she obliterates the hyphen at the cost of her sanity. There’s a reckless porousness to her work, a willingness to return again and again to that garden, locked-out and trembling. Formative nightmares can sometimes fuel you. An artist can decide to have her own baby, despite the stern advice of her record label. She can willingly choose the terror of motherhood. In photoshoots, her belly will protrude. ‘Wear a Condom’, her crop top reads. She will flash a cheeky grin. Her first child will be born three weeks before her debut album.

If you are implicated in everything you witness, and vice versa, then how do you live with yourself? The borders of your personhood become dangerously compromised. Such hyper-empathy can be a perilous position from which to think or live, one with personal and professional costs.

Read the essay

from Longreads https://ift.tt/nUFgPE8

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/FqK6nLC