A big announcement from Search Engine plus, "What's in your cocaine?"

0:29Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. be invisible to you. On incognito mode, we'll have a bunch of extras people have been asking for. You can learn more about those extras again at searchengine.show. We're very excited about incognito mode. We've wanted for a while a place where we could push ourselves to be looser and more experimental. Incognito mode is going to be that. It's a testing ground for the kinds of ideas that feel like they belong in a more intimate setting, sort of our own personal fringe festival. We are very grateful to our sponsors. They support our work. They offer products we're happy to tell you about.

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1:38People unlearning a lesson the internet's taught us, which is that free things we love usually survive. It feels unusual to ask people to pay for something they can have for free. It honestly makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable. but I'm doing it because I think it's the way. I think it's the future. And my hope is that you'll join us there. We will have a new episode for you of Search Engine next Friday. If you want to sign up to help us, we are at searchengine.show. And if you want to hear a preview of some of what we're offering over there, stick around. It is a bonus episode in which we answer the question, what is in your cocaine?

2:16This is an interview with a high-level drug dealer, one of the most candid people I've ever spoken to. If you ever use illicit drugs, if you have friends who do, or if you're just curious about how a market like this functions, I think you will find yourself talking about this interview as incessantly as I have been. Okay, I'm going to stop selling it and just play it for you. Enjoy.

2:55So, last fall, I had this question that had come up while I was doing some reporting about fentanyl. I'd been talking to a journalist named Ben Westhoff, and I'd wondered about something that had never made sense to me. Drug dealers were putting fentanyl in drugs like cocaine, but I didn't understand why the users of those drugs weren't noticing. Because presumably a stimulant like cocaine and an opiate like fentanyl offer very different highs. So I asked Ben about it. One of the things I find confusing about that is that, like, my assumption is that a stimulant user, like a cocaine user, would notice, hey, this is like a different high.

3:34Like, why is it possible to cut it into drugs that are supposed to have very different reactions? The first thing I think is that cocaine in America is so adulterated and it has been for so long that Americans have no idea what real cocaine is actually like. I've heard from people who've had it pure that it's basically like it's more like ecstasy, actually. It gives you this euphoric feeling rather than this sort of like manic high and that it lasts a long time. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is I think that just users aren't really in a position to complain. And as long as they're getting high at all, I think most people probably are satisfied with their coke being cut with fentanyl.

4:22So Ben said essentially that the quality of illicit drugs in America is so bad, most of the time users don't even know what they're supposed to be getting. Like cocaine users in America might not even know what actual cocaine feels like. I found that idea very interesting, so I took it to another person, a drug dealer we're going to call Nate. We ended up having a very frank conversation, me and this person who has been in the illicit drug market for a very long time. It felt like the kind of interview that deserved to stand on its own, and also potentially as a PSA for people who use drugs like cocaine or ketamine.

4:59Nate told me stories about his professional life, scenes from the complicated world of trying to figure out which drugs are safe to sell, and which aren't. And he had some advice about how people could try to stay safe in a completely unregulated drug market. To protect his identity, we've changed his voice with AI. Here's Nate. Hello? Hey. Hey, how's it going? Siri thinks your last name is pronounced Vought. Honestly, that means Siri is doing at least as well as most human beings. Everybody is Vought or Void. How's it pronounced? Vote. Vote. Like what you do in an election. Oh, that's great. That's a great lesson.

5:37Nate sells drugs for a living. He has a successful business in a major U.S. city, selling hard drugs to all sorts of people. He doesn't sell fentanyl. He doesn't sell heroin. He's a person who sells many other drugs, including cocaine. Can you tell me, like, do you remember the first time you heard of fentanyl? Like, what is the story of fentanyl as it hit you from your perspective? well i mean i have always tested everything that i saw i just half the person tested because it's like an ethical responsibility and so i got these fentanyl strips i didn't know exactly what it was it was before it was so widespread and people were dying left and right what year do you think this was?

6:222019, maybe. Okay. Not that long ago. And the primary method of testing for fentanyl is highly flawed. It gives almost half the time a false positive. Oh, wow. Nate says that now there are new fentanyl test strips, which work much better. They yield fewer false positives and are easier to use. You can find them at dancesafe.org. But in the early days, when the test strips didn't work as well and people were very scared. Nate was fielding a lot of angry phone calls. I would get like two or three phone calls a week. I just tested your shit and it has fentanyl and he's trying to kill me. And it would be for like everything, like MDMA.

7:06No one is putting fentanyl in MDMA. It's just not the kind of market that intersects. And if you go to Dansafe.org where they do mass spectrometer testing of all samples. You can just send a sample to these guys and they're going to tell you exactly proportionately what chemicals are in there. And there is not a single sample of MDMA in the thousands and thousands of samples that come in from all over the world that has fentanyl on it. We checked this with Dansafe. The executive director there confirmed that Dansafe has never found an example of MDMA with fentanyl in it. Although he said there was one case that was not lab-confirmed where he suspected fentanyl had been involved.

7:49Nate's experience seems to mostly track with Dan Safes. It's always coke or heroin, and a couple times ketamine, but almost never ketamine. And so that's how I started being aware of it, these strips that were telling me there's fentanyl and shit. Nate says even the fact that he is fielding calls from his customers and testing his drugs himself, that makes him unusual. He describes himself as a professional. He has a client list, he has regulars, he has a reputation to maintain. He says he'll even cut people off if he suspects they have a drug problem. But the problem, he says, with being an honest drug dealer is that you're the last step on a distribution chain filled with people who might be much less honest.

8:34I bought a key of what was supposed to be ketamine through a friend who was in the middle of COVID, I was like, dude, it is so dry. And this girl was like, I do know this guy, this Chinatown guy, and he'll get us something. So I buy a key. I give her like 30 grand. And she comes back with a kilo of, looks like ketamine. And I go to cook it down, and it turns into this rock hard, stinking mass. Quick primer on what it means to cook ketamine down. When drug dealers buy ketamine wholesale, they often buy it as a crystal, but when users consume it, it's usually bought as a powder. Nate, and people like Nate, turned ketamine crystals into ketamine powder by either crushing them or cooking them down.

9:24Normally. Except this one time that ketamine crystals, once they were cooked down, appeared to be something else. A rock-hard, stinking mass of God knows what. Nate had been ripped off. In a normal business, that would be a reason to ask for a refund. from the supplier. Nate's not in a normal business. So here's what happened on the day he found himself staring down at his very expensive, very bad product. It's just complete adultery, and I don't even know what it is. There's some ketamine in there because it tested positive for ketamine, but it's a rock-solid bath. It's toxic. It's stinking. I put the pot in my kitchen for like six months, waiting to see if some chemical wizard could identify what it was cut with and if they could separate it, but no one ever could figure it out.

10:14And I ended up flushing it down the drain. I had absolutely no recourse to that guy who sold me that kilo. Right. There's no better business bureau you can go to either. No, no, no. And I'm not even going to ask those guys. Yeah. You know, those guys are killers. I mean, they're serious people. And my friend, I was like, can you just ask him? And she's like, okay. So she asked him and he was like, no, no, no refunds. It's ketamine. That's it. And then try it changes the number. Right. So you're in a position where you're out 30 grand, you eat the loss. Somebody else might not. Exactly. In that case, most people are going to recrystallize that and sell it.

11:00recrystallizing, which you may have done in chemistry class, is when an impure solid compound is mixed with a hot solvent to form a saturated solution. In this case, it would be a way to disguise the fact that this drug should not be consumed by anyone. Nate says most dealers are going to pull a trick like this because they don't care about customer service very much in a high demand illegal industry. He says he imagines the typical drug dealer and thinks, this guy might have stolen something to buy these bad drugs, or maybe he used his last bit of money. He just spent everything he had on this product.

11:35He's going to sell that fucking product. These are desperate people. These aren't people like me, you know? I have friends who have bought bad drugs in the pre-Fentanyl era. In high school, I saw people lose cash on some very expensive Pennsylvania suburb oregano. I remember a writer friend buying what turned out to be significantly overpriced baking soda from a stranger in a bar, it's not that the idea that illegal drugs might not be what they're supposed to be is some shock to me. But talking to Nate, a picture emerges of a drug world where almost everything is adulterated, and most users don't notice, because as long as what they're taking has an effect, they assume it's legitimate.

12:15A state of affairs that has probably always existed, but has become consequential now, in the age of fentanyl. Nate told me he'd seen a study from a few years back on cocaine in London, which found that the street cocaine there was only 15 % actual cocaine, which didn't actually surprise him all that much. Nate said cocaine in general is just a much, much, much more adulterated product than its users seem to want to consider. I sell the raw, you know, but what that means is I'm getting a brick straight from Mexico, straight from the cartels. It's pure cocaine, but pure cocaine, I mean, what does that mean?

12:53When I test that shit, I find all sorts of stuff in there. There's amphetamines in there, there's mixers and fillers, there's all sorts of stuff in it, because by the time it gets into a little gram baggie, it's been cut five or six or seven times.

13:24If you want to hear the rest of this interview, go to searchengine.show, where you can sign up for Incognito Mode and immediately access this entire episode. Nate is about to tell us about one of the most common and disgusting adulterants in cocaine, honestly one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard. There's a lot more practical advice, and the worst drug mix-up story I can imagine. That's at searchengine.show. Thanks for listening.