The China Connection: How One D.E.A. Agent Cracked a Global Fentanyl Ring
(nytimes Oct 19 2019)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/magazine/china-fentanyl-drug-ring.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Around 3 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 3, 2015, Laura and Jason Henke awoke with a start at their home in Minot, N.D. Their dog was barking wildly. At the door, in the early morning shadows, they found a police officer and, behind him, a pastor. The officer asked to see Laura’s ID to confirm that he was at the correct address. Then he told them that their 18-year-old son, Bailey, was dead.
The officer didn’t have many details. Bailey Henke was living in Grand Forks, three hours east of his parents’ home in Minot, and the police there were working the case. The officer gave Laura the phone number for a detective in Grand Forks. She called and wrote down what he said: overdose, fentanyl. Laura had never heard of fentanyl; she wasn’t even sure how to spell it.
After a few minutes, the officer and the pastor left. A heavy snowstorm had closed the roads, leaving Laura and Jason unable to reach Grand Forks that night. They spent the dark hours sitting on the couch, waiting for the storm to clear, moving in and out of spasms of inconsolable crying. They mostly passed the time in silence. Their son was dead. What was there to say?
Before that knock on the door, Laura was certain that she knew everything about Bailey. She was the person he talked to when he had his first crush, and when he started dating his first girlfriend; she knew that he loved wearing Halloween costumes on random days throughout the year because it reminded him of playing dress-up as a kid; she laughed at the funny accents he practiced, at the dorky jokes only the two of them shared. In high school, Bailey was beloved. His teachers teased him about his “clown car,” because so many of the other students wanted to pile in to join him for lunch break. He was the type of kid that teachers remember, that they keep talking about for years.
When Bailey was a junior in high school, Laura caught him smoking pot in the basement. She said he had to stop, and he was apologetic, embarrassed, not defiant. She thought that was the end of it. Bailey just learned to be more discreet. His drug habit became worse in the fall of 2014, when he dropped out of community college after only a few months of classes and moved in with one of his best friends, Kain Schwandt, in Grand Forks. By the time they became roommates, Schwandt was using heroin multiple times a day. Bailey told his friends that he had tried heroin a few times over that summer. Living together, they both used more and more, until they found something even stronger.
Schwandt’s fentanyl connection was a friend of a friend, a local teenager named Ryan Jensen. Schwandt experimented with fentanyl before he began buying from Jensen, but it was in the form of a medicinal patch, a legitimate pharmaceutical product diverted from its intended use as a pain reliever. The powder Jensen sold was cheaper and more potent, and a small amount lasted a long time. Some medicinal patches held 100 micrograms and cost $300-$400. Ten milligrams of the powder — 100 times more than the patch — cost $10 and kept you high all day. The danger, too, was significantly greater, but once Schwandt tried the powder, he was hooked.
Jensen, the dealer, was quiet, introverted and brainy. He tried explaining to Schwandt once how he bought fentanyl and where it came from, but Schwandt wasn’t interested. “He said he got it on this website, and mentioned Bitcoin,” Schwandt told me. “It’s like he was speaking Chinese.” At first, Jensen only bought for himself; he wasn’t in it to make money, his friends told me. The allure of fentanyl was that it didn’t show up on standard drug screenings. Once word got out, people started coming over to Jensen’s house to get high with him. His mother later confided to Schwandt’s mother that she was just happy he had friends.
Jensen had a system, according to those who used with him. He knew that fentanyl was so potent that even a small dose could be deadly, so he liked to be there to make sure nothing went wrong. When he sold it, it was in carefully measured amounts. He gave it only to people he knew and trusted. Schwandt was one of those people; after coming over enough times with Schwandt, Bailey became one, too. The night Bailey died, just a few months after he began using, Jensen broke one of his rules: After they smoked together, he let Bailey leave with several doses.
(continued in link - long article)