Natalie Marie Gonzalez: High Achiever Drug Dealer

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0:34Natalie Marie Gonzalez:In a letter to the court, Natalie Marie Gonzalez shares a memory of her father. As a kid, she'd sometimes watch him sip a cocktail behind the wheel. He'd glance back at his kids with a grin, slowly lift both hands off the steering wheel, and declare that technically he wasn't drinking and driving anymore. It was the kind of joke that probably got laughs at the time. But in a San Francisco courtroom, it lands very differently. Theoretically, you could kill somebody doing that. It kind of speaks to this idea that if you don't think about the dark side of this stuff, and you just convince yourself that you're being a force for good, and you ignore the potentially negative consequences, is you can kind of get yourself into some deep-rooted denial and not see the train wreck coming.

1:33Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Stanford graduate Natalie Marie Gonzalez had, metaphorically, taken her hands off the wheel. And driven by a delusional sense of doing good, she crashed. You get out into the world and you're like, what can I do to really make a difference? But even back then, like fresh out of college, by all accounts, it seems like the quote unquote darker side of her life was starting to manifest.

2:11Natalie Marie Gonzalez:This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Natalie Marie Gonzalez, High Achiever Drug Dealer. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we dive into the story of Natalie Marie Gonzalez, a Stanford graduate who turned a high-achieving future into a high-risk delivery operation in San Francisco.

2:53Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Natalie Marie Gonzalez was born and raised in the mountain town of Bailey, Colorado. Her parents were self-described hippies, and Gonzalez's upbringing had a certain granola charm to it. She grew up eating organic produce long before it was popularized by luxury grocery stores in a house her father built by hand. From an early age, it was clear that Gonzalez was gifted. Her free-spirited nature was complemented by a wide-ranging curiosity and an intellect to match. Here's Nate Gartrell from the East Bay Times. Natalie was raised by both parents in what she described as a loving and supportive environment.

3:41She was the recipient of a competitive national young scholars program through which she received, quote, comprehensive educational advising and financial support from the eighth grade through high school to pursue her academic and talent goals. Gonzalez received over$30 ,000 in stipends to pay for dance and violin lessons, summer programs, extracurricular activities, and a service trip to Peru.

4:07Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Gonzales was the kind of kid who was often described as a big fish in a small pond. She won a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cook Foundation when she was just 13, which funded any extracurricular interest she could imagine. On top of that, she maxed out the classes her local high school could offer and had to take math and physics college courses online. While this genius childhood in the mountains sounds idyllic, Gonzalez was no stranger to tragedy. In middle school, she was kind of subjected to this really traumatic incident where a gunman came into her middle school campus and took a classroom hostage.

4:52and she and a bunch of her classmates were basically rescued by teachers and ultimately by a SWAT team that had to come down and negotiate while, you know, her friends at school were still stuck in there. And then it culminated with one of the students being shot and killed. That was something that happened just as she's sort of coming into adolescence and having to grapple with that, you know, can't be easy for anybody.

5:23Natalie Marie Gonzalez:The victim of this hostage situation was 16-year-old Emily Keyes, whom Gonzalez considered a friend. The Keyes family and the Gonzalez family were close enough that the Gonzalez's parents helped the Keyes family fund the I Love You Guys Foundation, which helps schools and communities set up crisis response and recovery programs. Shortly after the hostage situation, Gonzalez's family was rocked by the financial crash of 2008. Her parents filed for bankruptcy, and to make ends meet, her father took a job in Afghanistan. Her mother remembers this period of time as particularly difficult for Gonzalez, noting that she coped with her stress by going out with her friends more often and starting to drink and smoke marijuana.

6:16Natalie Marie Gonzalez:While no mother wants to watch her kid party hard in high school, the Gonzalez family had a less conventional approach to drugs and alcohol in the home. The Gonzalez parents allowed their children to have wine with dinner, and even spoke openly with them about their own psychedelic use. They called it the, quote, European approach. Regardless of her developing relationship with substances, Gonzalez continued to be an extraordinary student. She graduated high school as a valedictorian of her class and went on to get her degree in civil and environmental engineering and architectural design from the prestigious Stanford University.

7:00Natalie Marie Gonzalez:While an undergraduate, Gonzalez joined a variety of clubs and discovered a passion for environmental advocacy. She lived in a student co-op, organized organic dinners for her friends, and started dating a guy who was interested in alternative housing and eco-conscious land management. In short, she went from a hippie home life to a hippie college life. going to Stanford in the early 2010s, you know, the Bay Area in general, colleges in general, pretty liberal views on drug use. Even when people are pursuing like high degrees or, you know, even otherwise responsible people, you're not really going to see a lot of shying away.

7:48In fact, obviously just the opposite. People like to experiment in their college years and so forth. And it seems like that was like hardly even a question based on the descriptions of how she was raised.

8:02Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Gonzalez may have been a big fish in a small pond back in Bailey, Colorado, but it seems she was a big enough fish for Stanford too. She was offered a spot in a master's program directly out of undergrad and continued to be a star student. Just to throw out another quote from one of her lectures at Stanford, Natalie distinguished herself as a top student in the class. Natalie is also the most impressive and promising student I've ever had over the three years that I've offered this course and the five years that I've been teaching at Stanford. You know, so even in the cream of the crop, she was standing out as a scholar and as a person with a bright future, even to people who literally go through hundreds of students a year.

8:49Natalie Marie Gonzalez:After a few months in her master's program, Gonzales lost steam. Her whole life had been about achievement. In a letter to her parents, she explained she needed to focus on personal development, spiritual enlightenment, and her life outside of academics. To quote again from court records, it says she never envisioned herself chasing a corporate job, but instead hoped to work on environmental projects that were socially productive. After college, she worked as an after-school program manager at Hidden Villa, a small-scale organic farm that teaches outdoor education and sustainable agriculture to local school children.

9:28And then it just emphasizes her passion for environmental issues and stuff like that. So she's clearly has this emphasis on making the world a better place and, you know, not just organic farming, but like a lot of college students do. You get out into the world and you're like, what can I do to really make a difference?

9:53Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Gonzalez left behind her high achieving youth and all the ways in which a Stanford master's degree could have helped her land a well-paying, powerful job. Instead, Gonzalez was a substitute teacher at a Waldorf-style preschool, led spiritual development retreats, and fundraised for causes that she cared about. She threw a legendary 30th birthday party where purportedly she raised tens of thousands of dollars for the World Rainforest Fund. Gonzalez was having fun. Maybe she never left her co-op college mindset because she never had to go corporate. Alongside her volunteer work and spiritual endeavors, Gonzalez never stopped experimenting with drugs.

10:40Natalie Marie Gonzalez:She believed that drugs like marijuana and even ketamine, psilocybin, and LSD could be used recreationally by adults that were educated on their risk factors. These were the principles she was literally raised on. She was around people who had casual, positive relationships with drugs who didn't go too far and didn't get hurt. Her relationship to mind-altering or mind-expanding substances was more naive than, say, someone who had experienced the traumatic effects of addiction. And she wasn't alone. Advocacy for the legalization of marijuana was gathering major steam across the country, and the population's general attitude towards drugs had really loosened up.

11:29it seems like from the uh from everything that that i've read about this case it's heavily implied if not outright stated that she was doing drugs too with people but at the very least it was like all around her and to the point where it was like heavily normalized which again is not that unusual i mean we've all been through our 20s or been through our teens it's almost feels like weird or archaic to talk about it in like these foreign terms when it's something that's such a common part of a lot of people's lives. But what's interesting to me was like this emphasis on safe access and trying to coach this drug use stuff in terms of like to do it in a way where the positive reasons that people do drugs are emphasized, like expanding your mind and having new experiences without the things that scare people off of it, like addiction.

12:27You read about her biography as it's laid out in these court documents, and it's talking about going to festivals, going to spiritual retreats, and hanging out with friends in kind of communal contexts where drug use was just one of the things that naturally took place.

12:46Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Gonzalez was a smart girl. While she was a huge proponent of harm reduction strategies, she knew that people could get hurt and even die from drug addiction and overdose. Which is why what happened next in her story is so shocking.

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15:31Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Natalie Marie Gonzalez had everything going for her. High school valedictorian, star student at Stanford. By every measure, the world was wide open. She just never reached for it. Gonzales backed away from academic life and turned towards the esoteric. She worked on environmental projects, led meditation weekends, and dreamt of someday opening a spiritual retreat center. She also dabbled in mind-opening drugs like psilocybin mushrooms. Gonzales went to festivals, scenes where casual drug use was just part of the experience. She knew the risks. Fentanyl overdoses were on the rise and the danger was real.

16:20Natalie Marie Gonzalez:You could try to buy cocaine and end up with a lethal dose of fentanyl instead. So Gonzalez did what Gonzalez does. She took matters into her own hands. If she could raise tens of thousands of dollars for the World Rainforest Fund, well, then shortly she could keep her friends from taking laced drugs. So that's what she did. She started growing psilocybin mushrooms for the people in her life around the San Francisco Bay Area. Homegrown hallucinogens, she figured, were something she could vouch for. When that went well, she started selling those mushrooms outside of her immediate circle. She sold to party people at Burning Man, a few local college students, and some therapists that offered psychedelic experiences through their practice.

17:10Natalie Marie Gonzalez:But as it turns out, becoming a drug dealer can be a slippery slope. What starts out as sharing mushrooms with friends has a way of expanding. Soon enough, people are asking for cocaine and ketamine too. Gonzalez could have said no, but she took the opportunity to widen her inventory. Her logic was that she was already giving people safe access to mushrooms and marijuana. So why not extend that to harder drugs she could personally vouch for? Here's Nate Gartrell from the East Bay Times. I think there was always like this emphasis away from the harder stuff and more towards like mind opening substances, for lack of a better term.

17:56You've got, you know, what started with marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy, mescaline, ketamine, and then, quote unquote, more obscure substances like DMT, which is something that is derived from a particular root. Those around her, including friends and even family members, expressed idealistic support for, quote, safe access. Ms. Gonzalez saved the proceeds of drug sales for her long-term goal of buying some rural land and opening a spiritual retreat center. And that's, you know, ostensibly what she was saving up money from the drug business.

18:34Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Safe access is a strategy of harm reduction, which is a set of practices and principles that aim to help those who suffer from addiction. By providing services like a safe space to use, drug checking tools that can detect fentanyl, and emergency overdose treatments like naloxone, individuals who use substances can maintain their dignity and autonomy while reducing the risk of death. Harm reduction principles save lives by meeting people where they are in their addiction as opposed to expecting sobriety before giving aid. As a community-oriented person who was familiar with the recreational drug scene, it makes sense that these principles were important to Gonzalez.

19:20Natalie Marie Gonzalez:However, supplying drugs to people is not a recognized form of harm reduction. And she knew that. It seems like her getting involved in drug trafficking was just kind of a natural thing that happened. And frankly, if you start using drugs and you start acquiring drugs and you have like a crude understanding of capitalism even, and you start to learn like how people buy and scale up, then you can apply those. It's almost like harder not to have it not occur to you that you can apply those concepts to your drug use and at the very least save money or think a little bit bigger than that and start making money.

20:01And when it's all around you and your friends are all kind of partaking and nothing bad has happened yet, it seems like something that, you know, you can do to your heart's content. And if you throw in the sort of justification of like, well, I'm going to use this money to build a commune or to do something to be even bigger force for good. You know, it's really easy to fall into that trap.

20:28Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Gonzalez thought she could have it both ways make money selling drugs save up for a spiritual retreat center and keep it all ethical by ensuring her supply was clean harm reduction became a kind of shimmering mirage something that let her avoid the uncomfortable truth she wasn't saving the world she was a drug dealer in the drug world there's such a wide spectrum and you know you have like this like phantom of fentanyl that's killing people by the thousand and it's like something where if you're growing up in this day and age you're going to have friends who die of fentanyl overdoses and you're going to see the effects of it firsthand and it's it doesn't matter the class it doesn't matter your upbringing it's going to come knocking at your door in one one way or another and it's really scary.

21:20And then on the other side, you have like substances that used to get people sent to prison, like marijuana that are completely normalized. And, you know, you see people walking down the street, smoking weed all the time. It kind of lends itself to the idea that there's like a good way to do drugs and a bad way to do drugs. And that if you help people, you know, not get certain drugs that are, that are cut with fentanyl to save money, that you're actually performing a service. And I think that that's what the people in this story kind of convinced themselves or even maybe even set out to do from the beginning.

21:55Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Regardless of whether she genuinely believed she was doing good or just had her eye on the money, her instincts kicked in as the business grew. And while she claimed she wasn't interested in a corporate career, she ended up modeling her drug dealing business after popular Silicon Valley apps. This does take place near Palo Alto, after all. She named her business The Shop and hired three delivery drivers to work with her. They drove around the San Francisco Bay Area, taking orders and delivering door-to-door. Does this sound suspiciously like an app you already have on your phone? The things to me that made this stand out was it was basically following like the DoorDash, GrubHub, or like one of those grocery delivery app, like business models, where people would just order online and then they'd have a courier show up and it's kind of like a pot dispensary or something that does deliveries, except they were doing that with the type of drugs that you don't usually see being dealt that way.

22:59You know, usually you have to go to a neighborhood where it's a little sketchy and take your chances. And this, it's like they bring it right to you. It all seems very safe and streamlined. You can kind of tell from their interactions on text and stuff, like it almost sounds kind of corporate.

23:15Natalie Marie Gonzalez:Customers ordered through the encrypted messaging app Signal, where they could see the shop's menu, which included a wide range of drugs from marijuana to cocaine to Adderall. She went by the codename Sodor, which translates to savior or deliverer in Greek. There was a$300 minimum for orders, a set delivery route, and warnings about safe use sprinkled in. Quotes include, Please use responsibly, take care of each other, drink water, and go outside. To top off this streamlined and sanitized drug dealing operation, her delivery drivers would often pull up to the drop-off in a Subaru with a puppy that their clients were encouraged to play with.

24:02Natalie Marie Gonzalez:By 2023, Gonzalez was a Stanford graduate with a booming drug business and the attention of the feds. The DEA became aware of the shop sometime in March of 2023, and by April, an undercover agent had been introduced to Gonzalez. This undercover agent built a business relationship with the shop and Gonzalez from April through August of 2023. Each time he reached out, he asked to buy a bulk amount of Adderall pills, upwards of 2 ,000 each time. In one of the deals that was cited in the criminal complaint, she's clearly admitting that she knows the person she's selling to and this one who turned out to be an undercover federal agent, by the way.

24:51But the person's posing as a drug dealer and she's saying, who's your primary clientele? We serve a lot of students and young professionals who use them for work, but I'm curious what your understanding of the use is for your clients. And then he texts back, oh, well, it's mostly college grads and stuff like that. And she writes back, thank you for sharing. I more just want to make sure that we are sharing responsibly rather than contributing to addictions that are damaging people. And then she proceeds to sell a thousand Adderall pills that turn out to be counterfeit.

25:26Natalie Marie Gonzalez:The Adderall that the DEA had their eyes on was far from the homegrown marijuana and mushrooms that Gonzalez started her business selling. Due to a nationwide shortage of actual Adderall pills, many people who relied on the drug, both prescribed or not, were unable to get it. To fill the gap in the market, dealers started to sell a counterfeit pill that had similar effects to the original Adderall pill, but made with methamphetamine. Not only was this counterfeit pill easier to obtain, but it was way cheaper to produce, so black market profit margins skyrocketed. Because they weren't made in a controlled lab like regular medication, these counterfeit pills were also at high risk for being laced with fentanyl.

26:14Natalie Marie Gonzalez:And unfortunately, fentanyl is a cost-effective ingredient. In short, selling Adderall is bad. Selling possibly laced methamphetamine disguised as Adderall is even worse. there's basically like a spectrum of obviously different drugs have different costs and fentanyl because it's synthetic is relatively easy to make in a lab and you can mass produce it and so it's a powder it's pretty easy to smuggle too you can profit a lot more than if you were actually selling the stuff and you had to pay all that overhead or get fake prescriptions or go all the things that people do to get that stuff. And the same thing goes with Adderall or a lot of prescription drugs.