// quick, incomplete notes detailing: Everything becomes synthetic // (Kensington lab analyses / Cumberland poppy patch / opium to red pills in a generation / xylazine / renunciation)
MARKET REPORTS ㊀ ▩ I think it’s valuable to follow sources that analyze the illicit drug supply. I am not sure whether or not illicit drug markets might predict trends in the aboveground consumer world, but, at least, they are usually slightly ahead (because, there, the economic short-termism at the heart of modern commerce does not need to be concealed and is not held back by any legal code? because illicit drugs are more closely tied than anything legal, save perhaps pornography, to drives?) If they do not in fact have any predictive powers, or if it is often too difficult to pull conclusions out of lab results of urban dope packages, it seems worthwhile to be informed. ▩
MARKET REPORTS ㊁ ▩ Everything is synthetic. This is something worth noting. This is something that everyone needs to understand. ▩ I thought about this again this morning, reading a report from Philadelphia, about dope packages coming back—the ratio from memory, not precise—one part fentanyl to three thousand parts xylazine. ▩ This is interesting to me: If you were to buy a stamp of heroin on the street in any major North American city, it is increasingly unlikely that it would contain any heroin at all. This is true even in the great heroin capitals. Five, six, seven years ago, most heroin was replaced by fentanyl and analogues. But fentanyl now is scarce, too. And so a bag of dope is not heroin and it is not the compound that replaced heroin but a mixture of other ingredients to produce an effect somewhat like what it has replaced. The recipe varies, but it is likely to contain the tranquilizer xylazine, benzimidazole opioids (brophine, metonitazene, butonitazene), and exotic benzodiazepines (etizolam is popular, as well as flualprazolam, clonazolam, flubromazolam). ▩
DOWNWARD SPIRAL (of PURITY before REPLACEMENT) ▩ The natural (or the more natural) is substituted with the synthetic. The synthetic substitute can itself be substituted with fewer restrictions. There is a downward spiral. In illicit drug markets, this is more dramatic. But it can take place in other contexts. ▩
NOTE ON WHAT IS NATURAL AND WHAT IS NOT ▩ (I remember once _ on the Island _ somewhere outside of Cumberland _ leaving the highway _ salmonberry and Scotch broom in the ditches _ walking up through the abandoned logging roads turned to trails for the mountain bikers _ down a washout _ we came to a falls _ forty feet high _ climbed the edges of it and came to a meadow full of poppies: maybe the forgotten patch of some refugee from Hastings, come to drink his tea in peace / draft dodger burnout? the Chinese former residents, whose graveyard, forgotten and overgrown, we passed on the way up — — all I will say is that it was a beautiful scene _ all those fragile petals on clean breeze _ and I of course went and ran my pocketknife around the belly of a pod just to watch the latex drip.) ▩ Humans and Papaver somniferum have lived together since the Neolithic. The methods used by Pashtun and Bengali farmers go back thousands of years. Opium is natural. And morphine is, too, and so is heroin, since they are processed from it (this is a simplification, with “processed from it” covering a lot) (but did you know that the DNA of the Papaver somniferum can be extracted from heroin?). I mean that heroin is still the product of dusty hands stroking poppy pods in distant highlands. It is the product of soil and moisture and fertilizer and air. It is natural. (I saw it myself up in a meadow outside Cumberland.) (This is a fanciful definition of natural. I admit it. It comes down to: it comes from the Earth.) ▩
HISTORY ㊀ (OPIUM → MORPHINE ↔ HEROIN → RED PILLS) ▩ The same downward spiral can be seen earlier. ▩ The opium addict seen in prints and photographs, somewhere in subterranean Shanghai, hidden from any sunshine, relaxing on his divan, incapacitated, wasting away, romantic…—this is a short lived phenomenon. By the 1920s, it was more profitable for producers to take their opium and turn it into heroin or morphine. The Green Gang innovated. And so the pipe and the den were replaced with tinfoil, the hypodermic needle, and the pill. And this last innovation—the pill—became important, since it could conceal further substitution. Early formulations contained morphine and binding agents, but that did not last long. A 1925 recipe, which could be made into ten thousand doses, lists as its ingredients: ► forty-eight ounces of lactose ► sixteen ounces sugar ► five ounces of caffeine ► two ounces heroin hydrochloride ► a half ounce of strychnine nitrate ► an ounce of quinine sulfate. This was bulked out with gum and water. A few years later, a scientist tasked by an agency of the League of Nations to analyze the pills found that they were they were mostly caffeine and strychnine, with only trace amounts of heroin. This recipe came to dominate. Vast amounts of caffeine and strychnine were being legally imported into China in the 1920s to produce these pills. ▩ It took a few decades to go from opium to morphine and heroin to a synthetic replacement that contained none of the preceding ingredients. (This produced a nation of caffeine addicts. The supply of caffeine from abroad was cut, or restricted to what the Soviet Union could provide. In 1956, pharmaceutical producers began extracting guanine from fish scales, which was then converted to xanthine, and then caffeine. This went into injectable ampules of sodium benzoate and caffeine. The Great Leap Forward was propelled in part by widespread abuse of caffeine.) ▩
HISTORY ㊁ (BROWN, BLACK, WHITE) ▩ In the early days, American retailers of illicit drugs could choose between a Mexican supply or heroin coming from the France (this was Near East or Indochina morphine, routed by the Corsicans, under Central Intelligence Agency protection, to Mediterranean hubs for processing into heroin). Later, after Major-General Ouane Rattikone’s victory in the 1967 Opium War and a joint venture with the CIA, a supply of Southeast Asian heroin came online. There were brown, black, and white, each with their own chemical profile, reflecting cultivation and processing techniques. This was a time of plenty. But it did not last. The French Connection was dismantled. The end of American involvement in wars in Indochina meant that Golden Triangle heroin disappeared from all but a few West Coast markets. Colombian cartels began taking over cultivation and logistics. Colombian and Mexican heroin was processed to mimic varieties that disappeared from the market: chemists pioneered “gunpowder” heroin from Colombian sources to replace Near East brown powder, and made a highly-processed powder from Mexican sources that looked a lot like Golden Triangle No. 4 heroin. Purity peaked in this period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ▩ The Mexican and Colombian operators became vulnerable, however, to a challenge. Stepped-up interdiction efforts and new products from Purdue Pharma cut into their business. Through this period, the amount of fields under cultivation decreased. Less heroin was being produced in Mexico and Colombia, as well as in the Golden Triangle. Beginning around the 2010s, with pill mills closing down and pressure on the cartels to step up their supply, the cartels had to turn to fentanyl to make up the shortfall. ▩ Attempts to regulate fentanyl and control the supply of its precursors to Mexican producers has been partially successful. Legal changes in China were important. A global pandemic made it harder to move it around. And so, fentanyl needed to be replaced, too. ▩
CAN THERE BE RATIONAL ADDICTION? // WHAT IS RATIONAL CONSUMPTION? ▩ The replacement of the natural and the adulteration of the synthetic substitution turns the product from one that might, even in the case of a terrifying narcotic, like morphine, if not extend life, then at least sustain it in some form. Heroin addiction cannot be called rational consumption, I suppose, but it is less irrational than the type of consumption that follows its replacement and replacement and replacement again by synthetic products. I mean that rational consumption—even, if we can call it that, rational addiction—is impossible. I am comparing here the addiction to heroin with the now more frequent state in which people find themselves, which is simultaneous addiction to opiates, benzodiazepines, assorted tranquilizers, and even synthetic cannabinoids. Some of this addiction is physical but it is just as powerfully to a mental void, to the chaotic process, to a lifestyle. ▩ But if the real is gone, what should you do? If the substitute is so adulterated that it no longer resembles what it replaced, then what should you do? In this case, you might say: Quit. Renounce it all. It works for this example of illicit drugs, but what about when you begin finding dangerous adulteration everywhere you look? Will you be able to renounce it all?