China White

In the late 1970s, a wave of peculiar drug overdose deaths hit Southern California. The victims came from across the social strata, and whatever had killed them had done so quickly and at very small doses. Rumors rose from the streets of Los Angeles and San Diego of something called “China White,” supposedly an especially potent form of heroin that had just shown up in regional drug markets, though no one seemed to know where it had come from. This was hard for investigators to square, since these overdose victims often showed no signs of heroin or other known opiates in their system. A few of the dead were found with small amounts of a white powder, and the standard tests had no clue what it was. By 1981, the mystery drug seemed to have vanished from the Southern California drug scene.

“China White” turned out be a chemical compound called a-Methylfentanyl, a powerful synthetic narcotic that had been created in the labs of Jannsen Pharmaceutica in the 1960s. How it got onto the streets of California remained a mystery, though many offered theories. Some said that instructions on how to create the drug had leaked from Jannsen sometime in the 70s. Other said the Soviets had unleashed the drug onto American shores. To this day, no one knows precisely how a-Methylfentanyl made it to the streets.

Though a-Methylfentanyl seemed to disappear from street use after the 1970s, new and more potent forms of fentanyl popped up during the 1980s. These variants came hard and fast, and in 1984 Congress granted the DEA the ability to ban drugs immediately in order to combat the rapidly evolving chemistry. Fentanyl’s geographic reach spread as well. It resumed its rampage not only only in California but also in what was becoming the American Rust Belt. In the suburbs of Los Angeles as well as the deindustrializing towns of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, something similar to “China White” was responsible for not only a wave of deaths but also a form of drug-induced Parkinson’s Disease the likes of which medical authorities had never seen. Young men in their twenties were coming down with an ailment that usually doesn’t appear until a person’s sixties. It caused immediate heart failure and almost as immediate addiction, and communities saw their burglaries and robberies skyrocket as people scrambled for money to keep up their supply.

Fentanyl in its various form killed over 70,000 in the United States in 2021, up from around 50,000 the year before. It now kills twice as many Americans annually as all other narcotics combined. It has hit towns throughout the the American interior like a plague, killing dozens in towns populated by hundreds. When a particular bad batch hits a town, there are stories of lone ambulances pulled around to several overdose incidents in a single day. According to officials who have seen the arrival of powdered cocaine and black tar heroin and methamphetamine, fentanyl is the most dangerous narcotic threat the country has ever seen. It is cheap and easy to distribute, since you don’t need a lot of it to do some serious damage — a briefcase was once found in the back of a car in New York that contained enough fentanyl to kill all of New York City.

We may never know where “China White” came from, but we do know where over 95% of the fentanyl currently on the American market came from: China. The Chinese punish drug offenses in their own country with incredible brutality. Users are exiled from society and placed in prison camps, and pushers are usually executed — sometimes inside government vans for which you politely wait by the roadside until it picks you up, euthanizes you, and transports your body for immediate cremation. And yet China manufactures the global supply of fentanyl almost entirely for export, and the United States is far and away its biggest customer. The disconnect between what it tolerates internally and what it sells externally had led some to believe the fentanyl epidemic amounts to a targeted Chinese attack on the United States, aimed squarely at what had been its most productive population — the skilled labor class of the American interior. Perhaps picking up where some believe the Soviets left off.

If the fentanyl epidemic is indeed a foreign attack, it’s against a vulnerable target. Drugs like fentanyl aren’t “party drugs,” and they’re not used to enhance performance or otherwise gain an edge on competition. They’re escape hatches from reality, imbibed by lost and hurting souls who are often well-aware of the extent to which they toe their own graves. In its decadence, America views reality as something poisonous — something to be “cured” if possible, and otherwise ignored until it crashes through in the form of suffering and death. There have always been those lost to narcotics, and their prevalence is usually an indicator of a society’s spiritual health. Now they are becoming legion, scattered about a nation beset by a nagging sensation that it is coming undone.