What’s really in your cocaine

When journalist PJ Vogt started reporting on the fentanyl crisis, he ran into a puzzle. Drug dealers were cutting stimulants like cocaine with an opioid like fentanyl—drugs that produce completely different highs. Why wouldn’t users notice? The answer he got from journalist Ben Westoff was startling: “Cocaine in America is so adulterated, and it has been for so long that Americans have no idea what real cocaine is actually like.” Users who have had pure cocaine describe it as feeling more like ecstasy—euphoric and long-lasting—rather than the short, jittery experience most Americans know. And as long as people are getting high at all, most are satisfied.

This observation sent Vogt to a source he calls Nate, a drug dealer in a major US city who has been in the illicit market for years. Nate doesn’t sell fentanyl or heroin, but he sells cocaine, ketamine, MDMA, and other drugs to a regular clientele. He describes himself as a professional with a reputation to maintain—someone who tests every product he receives and will even cut off customers he suspects have a drug problem. But being an honest drug dealer, he explains, means being the last link in a distribution chain full of people who are far less scrupulous.

The nightmare of unregulated chemistry