Sep 9, 2026 · 32 min · 16 segments
An account of the North American fentanyl crisis told through stories and photographs of its victims…
Emily DuftonHostYeah, I was originally planning to write a cultural history of ecstasy, the drug.
But after poking around, started realizing that most so-called ecstasy pills did not have any actual MDMA in them.
These are all synthetic chemicals that had these names no one had much heard of.
And so I really... went down the rabbit hole and learned that fentanyl was the most deadly of all of these new drugs.
And this was a time when fentanyl was already killing people, but almost no one knew anything about it.
Yeah, you're really early in this, right? If your book comes out in 2019, I'm assuming you're doing all this research and undercover trips to China, probably like at least a couple of years before that, right? When are you doing all of this?
And, you know, since then, the book has really, I think, had a big impact on sort of the level of government and legislation.
And I've, you know, I've testified on Capitol Hill a couple of times and consulted with all sorts of, you know, levels in federal government.
And can you just tell us briefly how you actually went undercover? You're like just just hanging out in a Chinese chemical factory?
Yeah, I was originally planning to write a cultural history of ecstasy, the drug.
But after poking around, started realizing that most so-called ecstasy pills did not have any actual MDMA in them.
These are all synthetic chemicals that had these names no one had much heard of.
And so I really... went down the rabbit hole and learned that fentanyl was the most deadly of all of these new drugs.
And this was a time when fentanyl was already killing people, but almost no one knew anything about it.
Yeah, you're really early in this, right? If your book comes out in 2019, I'm assuming you're doing all this research and undercover trips to China, probably like at least a couple of years before that, right? When are you doing all of this?
And, you know, since then, the book has really, I think, had a big impact on sort of the level of government and legislation.
And I've, you know, I've testified on Capitol Hill a couple of times and consulted with all sorts of, you know, levels in federal government.
And can you just tell us briefly how you actually went undercover? You're like just just hanging out in a Chinese chemical factory?
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