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January 27, 2023

In 1958, Leonard A. Read penned the timeless, iconic essay, “I, Pencil.”  His eloquent message, told from the perspective of the simple pencil, has served to instruct millions of people on how the complexity and brilliance of the free market economy — versus a socialist, centrally planned one — has been nothing less than a miracle in the practical application of uplifting mankind.  The following is meant to pay homage to Read’s formidable use of the first person, this time conveyed from a dangerous psychoactive drug, to demonstrate the destructive consequences of failing to combat criminal enterprises in their aggressive predation of society.

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I am fentanyl — an ordinary chemical of extraordinary power.  I am both a useful medicine and a fiendish poison.  I was created as a synthetic alternative to the narcotic drugs naturally found in the opium plant.  Depending on my molecular variety, or analogue, I can be as much as 10,000 times more potent than morphine.  Like heroin, named after the German word “heroic” for its astonishing strength, I am now more powerful and profuse than my opium-based cousin in the human desire for psychoactive “recreation.”

You may wonder why I should write about my presence and lineage.  Well, not only is my story interesting and mysterious, but I also kill tens of thousands of people every year — nearly 300 every single day in America — and that doesn’t include the multitudes of others across the globe that I put into a willing, blissful sleep, never to awaken.  Yet, seemingly, your government leaders find it intolerable to fight me through the simple (albeit difficult) enforcement of laws and regulations designed to protect your citizens.  Instead, they prefer only the morally soothing remedies of compassion-based programs that avoid “distasteful” measures such as arresting and imprisoning those who deliver me unlawfully.  But society’s choices concerning illegal drugs are actually not between right and wrong, but between the distasteful and the catastrophic.

I, fentanyl, can be snorted, smoked, swallowed, injected, trans-dermally absorbed, or even “hooped” — that is, anally inserted to be rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream as well as to bypass the body’s filtering systems.  This last method of ingestion was made famous by a man renowned, perhaps even deified, for dying with a policeman’s knee on the back of his neck.  But my presence in George Floyd’s system at nearly four times the normal lethal level was wholly ignored by your legacy media.  Good for me.

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We can begin my story with a teenage girl located in Anytown, USA.  I killed her.  I, and a modern culture too afraid to use the language of morality in telling young people that using illegal drugs is wrong.  And it’s “wrong,” instructed the late social scientist James Q. Wilson, because “it’s immoral.  And it’s immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul.”  Also, of course, life. 

She was given a single pill by her friend, who told her that taking it would be an amazing ride, like experiencing an extended orgasm, like seeing God.  The pill contained just a microgram too much of me to make it deadly — like so many of the pills secretly made by my criminal makers without the demanding cautions required of such powerful substances.  The DEA’s Special Testing Laboratory recently found that six of every ten pills sold by dealers today contain a potentially deadly dose of me due to the carelessness of my clandestine producers.  And that same agency, overwhelmed and under-supported by its own government, has also said that 379 million deadly doses of me in pill and powder form were seized last year alone — enough to kill every person in America, and then some.

The pill given to my young victim was sold to her dealer by a local representative of one of the many Mexican drug cartel “emissaries” who have set up shop in her area.  In fact, the various cartels — single-minded, predatory, violent — have a presence in over 3,000 American cities and towns.  They are here solely to sell me, and other neurochemical pleasures, to your citizens.  There may be no better modern example of Cicero’s warning to his fellow Romans about allowing an enemy within the gates.

That pill was one of many among ever-increasing numbers of shipments of me in various forms — powders, pills, liquids — smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border, along with other illegal commodities like methamphetamine, cocaine, and people, almost at will, given the chosen fecklessness of your current White House.  This particular shipment of me was manufactured in a crude, makeshift lab in the mountains of Sinaloa, not by chemists, but by unsophisticated thugs merely following a recipe.  I was then pressed into pills after being mixed unevenly with binders and fillers that sloppily created countless deadly “hot loads.”  Often, I am also blended with other drugs to generate infatuation and addiction among the users of cocaine and meth.  The cartels’ strategy in distributing me is as ruthless as it is terrifyingly effective and profitable.

I, fentanyl, was created in this primitive, illicit lab — and many others like it across Mexico —  by cooking my chemical precursor, known as NPP (or its close equivalent, 4-ANPP) with a handful of other essential ingredients, all costing only about $800 to synthesize twenty-five grams of pure dope that is then pressed into enough pills to fetch $800,000 in the neighborhoods across America.  Think about that: a profit margin of 1,000 percent!  That’s why, along with the “godlike” sensations that I can provide to the human brain, I will not be easily given up by either the Mexican cartels or my users.  Best of all, my conversion from NPP not only is realized at a one-to-one ratio, but is easier to make than meth!

My precursors, like the chemicals my villainous manufacturers acquire to make methamphetamine in ton quantities, come from China.  Colluding with their Chinese organized crime partners in the various Triads, my outlaw Mexican makers easily arrange for the acquisition and shipment of their chemicals from one of the nearly 400,000 chemical companies operating in that communist country.  China’s government, like Mexico’s, allows the bad guys to operate through an intricate vortex of corruption that serves the ultimate goals of both the transnational criminal groups and the politicos, while taking you for granted.  Again, good for me.