Late in the nineteenth century, four St. Louis men launched a company that made stoves. Ovens were extremely unreliable then, as likely to burn food as undercook it. But, led by a man named Charles Stockstrom—like his partners, he had arrived from Germany—the company produced stoves boasting game-changing thermostat control knobs, which let the cook accurately control the temperature. They called their enterprise the Quick Meal Stove Company.
Eventually known as Magic Chef, the company’s fortunes quickly blossomed, and it could barely keep up with demand. In the early 1900s it commissioned a massive factory in an Italian neighborhood of St. Louis called the Hill. The stunning brick complex was ideally located off Kingshighway Boulevard, a major north–south thoroughfare, and could even accommodate a railway, with tracks curving along its northeastern edge allowing train cars to unload directly at its receiving entrance. The company chipped in for the war effort in the 1940s to build bombs and fighter plane armaments, and meanwhile the stove business kept churning. At its peak Magic Chef employed some two thousand workers. It was part of the great hum of industry that helped make St. Louis one of the ten biggest cities in the country at the time.
Stockstrom commissioned an opulent home for himself and his family, a French Renaissance Revival mansion in nearby Compton Hill. It had eight gas fireplaces and more than thirty rooms, including a library, a butler’s pantry, and a bowling alley in the basement. The Magic Chef Mansion, as it’s now known, remains a popular St. Louis tourist attraction.
The factory, however, is not open for tours. After Magic Chef merged with another company and then was bought out in the 1950s, it abandoned its factory on the Hill, and though the building has since been used by other companies, it hasn’t been fully occupied since. During the late 2010s it was slated for demolition, but in its last years it was populated with drug users who wanted a secluded place to get high and pass out.
Jack Sanders started going there for that purpose around 2013. By then, parts of St. Louis already seemed like a ghost town. Because of the flight of industry and much of the white middle class, the city now housed slightly more than three hundred thousand residents, despite being built for almost three times that many. But the Magic Chef factory nonetheless stood out for its stunning fall from grace. From the street its white brick frame still looked sturdy, but its half million square feet of decrepitude included smashed glass, pools of water, dangling wires, and thirty-foot ceilings crumbling to the floor. Pigeons and rats picked at discarded refuse, while wildly colorful, carefully drawn graffiti shouted out street gangs.
Long ago condemned, and prone to fires, the building was sealed off, but Sanders and other users took advantage of a secret entrance, an aluminum door that had been ripped up a couple of feet, allowing just enough space for someone to shimmy under it. Inside were boiler rooms, abandoned lavatories, break areas, and other quiet corners to get high in, as well as dark subterranean recesses called “the tombs,” where anyone unwise enough to enter might get shanked for their stash. Those who understood the rules of engagement, however, often found a welcoming, if paranoid, community, where those with a shared, pressing need came to escape everything else in the world.
Sanders, a personal trainer who grew up in a well-to-do St. Louis suburb—and whose name has been changed to protect his identity—spent many nights there after his life went way off course. By 2013 he was homeless and crashing at the old Magic Chef factory regularly. He dragged a mattress into an empty area or sometimes shared space with other users on an old train car, one of the same brown boxcars that had once brought raw materials that helped Magic Chef build and sell more ovens than anyone else in the world. Jack had been using heroin excessively for over a decade, but something had begun to change. Heroin had never been a particularly safe pastime, in St. Louis or anywhere else, but he and others in the city had managed to forge a precarious existence for themselves. In 2013, however, it began to seem as if no one was safe. When fentanyl arrived, Jack’s friends began dropping like flies.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013 the “third wave” of the opioid epidemic began. Because of fentanyl, it is the most deadly one yet. In 2012, St. Louis saw 92 opioid-related deaths, a number that rose to 123 in 2013 and up to 256 in 2017. Another record-setting year is projected for the region in 2018.
“There really is no pure heroin in St. Louis anymore,” said Brandon Costerison of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse.
“It really became a problem for us around 2014, that’s when we really started noticing fentanyl-related deaths,” said Detective Ricardo Franklin, of the St. Louis County Police Department’s Bureau of Drug Enforcement. “You’ll get someone who assumes they are buying heroin and have no idea fentanyl is in it. Their body might be used to two [doses] of heroin, but if fentanyl is now mixed in, they are more at risk of an overdose.” Even for a notoriously dangerous city like St. Louis, in 2016 drug overdose deaths began outstripping murders.
Jack Sanders himself had helped fuel the local rise of fentanyl. It was a devastating new demon that no one—from street users to the DEA—saw coming.
“Fentanyl completely changed the game,” said Jack, who like many St. Louisans pronounces it “fentan-OL;” many elsewhere say “fentan-IL.” Jack keeps his beard trimmed and his muscles toned. He’s a rare local who can adroitly navigate both parts of the sharply segregated metro area: the poorer, largely black area to the north, and the mostly white, wealthier area to the south. When he’s in his largely white hometown in the St. Louis suburbs he seems to know everyone, talking up his glory days on the high school football team or debating the merits of various IPA beers, and he always knows how to address his audience, quick with pleasantries that feel genuine.
Jack has prison tattoos and disfigurations, including a scar across his forehead. He received it one night years back when he was desperate for heroin. He found himself on the wrong block, in the wrong part of town, and was pistol-whipped in the head. “I got caught slippin’,” he said.
Sanders’s story is dark and complicated. Growing up middle class, none of his siblings became addicted to drugs, and he had a stable, nuclear family. His father worked as an engineer, his mother as a cook. He had the support of family and a wide circle of friends. They got into mischief at concerts put on by Phish, the Vermont jam band beloved for its psychedelic guitar-noodling, which Jack and his friends followed on national tours during high school summers. Jack wore dreadlocks and drove his family’s 1983 Dodge Caravan, outfitted with a pony keg and a bong. “We had like three other cars full of people,” he said. “There was a posse of us, like a little gang. We all took care of each other.”
The community was just as important as the music. Jack’s friends began selling marijuana they had grown themselves, in shows’ parking lots. It didn’t feel risky; everyone was on drugs. Jack himself began experimenting: LSD, mushrooms, hashish, peyote, and even DMT. “My friends are jackasses,” he recalled with a laugh. “They put DMT in a bowl and put weed on top of it so I couldn’t see it. So I hit it, and I sunk into the couch. It was like taking twenty hits of acid. You turn white as a sheet.”
Plenty of recreational drug enthusiasts never take the plunge from psychedelics into addictive and often destructive opiates. Jack isn’t sure why he started taking heroin. “I think I had a hole in my heart, and I was trying to fill it,” he said. He mentioned childhood abuse, but declined to go into specifics. “I had a lot of shit happen to me when I was young, so maybe I was trying to somehow suppress that. But, is that the reason why I did heroin? No. I liked to get high.”
Heroin got him higher than any other drug he had previously tried. He discovered, however, that he could get even higher. Jack’s country buddies from the distant outskirts of St. Louis first introduced him to fentanyl. By the early 2000s it was already being abused in pharmaceutical form, including by many low-income rural residents. “They had boxes and boxes of these fentanyl patches,” he said. He’d put one on his chest, his legs, his shoulders, anywhere. Maybe two, three, or four to get an even bigger kick. “I’d be retarded.”
Even after trying fentanyl, Jack preferred heroin. Many users do. One online commenter described heroin as more “soulful.” “It’s cleaner, the high,” Sanders said. “Fentanyl makes you feel really dopey, drowsy. It will make you nod every time. It’s more like anesthesia.”
Heroin may have provided a better high, but it wasn’t a better product. Fentanyl, it became clear, was the real moneymaker.
Just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis lies the largely white Illinois town of East Alton. It’s also poor, but its poverty feels different. St. Louis is full of pretty, decaying red brick houses, but East Alton has more mobile home parks and graying one-story shacks crowned by non-operational satellite dishes. Dollar stores, title loan shops, and bars with slot machines line the commercial streets.
It’s just one of many small municipalities that dot the east side of the Mississippi, which include tiny fiefdoms catering to industrial polluters and the increasingly depopulated hamlet of East St. Louis. Many St. Louisans don’t cross into Illinois unless they’re after vice: gambling at spots like the Casino Queen riverboat, or prostitution, which is run out of massage parlors and strip clubs. The area has also been overwhelmed by fentanyl, and the surrounding Madison County set its all-time annual record for drug overdose deaths in 2018. “Fentanyl has taken over as the drug that is killing people here,” said county coroner Stephen Nonn. “When we go to a death scene and you still see the needle in the arm, we know it was fentanyl because it works that quick.”
Bree and Mike are a couple from East Alton. Mike is the forklift operator who began using synthetic cannabinoids when he was being tested for marijuana. When I met them he wore red-tinted sunglasses and a small gauged earring in each ear. Bree had on blue nail polish, running shoes, and two tube tops, one orange and one pink.
They were sitting at a picnic table out in front of a retro-themed diner called Gwig’s Family Restaurant, whose sign featured a clip-art photo of the perfect cheeseburger, below a wooden pallet attached to the building that read, “Proud to be an American.” Bree and Mike walked here, since their car had broken down. Mike’s dad had promised to get them a new one, so Mike would be able to work again. They said they would pay him back when they got their income tax return.
At that time, Bree was twenty-nine, Mike was thirty; both names are pseudonyms. Their last year had been a nightmare of drugs, poverty, betrayal, and rehabilitation attempts, all in the midst of trying to get their children to come out right. She had an eight-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl, and on this day her tube tops showed off her bump. She was due in about six weeks with her first child with Mike, a girl. They already had a name picked out.
Though they both previously had problems with fentanyl, they pledged to quit once she realized she was pregnant. And they did, for two months. Then she relapsed.
“It was my first time ever relapsing straight to fentanyl,” she said. “Couldn’t get off it. Oh my gosh, nothing worked. It was the worst. And the baby, she moved so much for three days straight. She was going through it terrible with me. I was having muscle spasms in my arms, my legs. I would soak in the hot tub probably seven times a day, and still my legs would even ache in the hot tub. There was nothing that would help. You couldn’t sleep at all, during the day or at night. It was horrible. I wish they would take it off the planet earth. It’s the devil’s drug, it really is.”
“We pretty much lost everything to that drug,” said Mike.
“We did,” agreed Bree. “We hit rock bottom.”
Bree and Mike both had experimented with plenty of drugs, and Bree initially knew a little bit about fentanyl, since her ex-mother-in-law was getting the patches prescribed. She never meant to try it, however. In fact, the first time, she didn’t realize what she was taking. “I thought it was just regular heroin,” she said. “Turned out it was fentanyl, and the high is amazing. It’s like a Xanax and a pain pill mixed. It’s an instant head and body buzz. It’s unexplainable. It’s almost like crack. I’ve never liked crack, but people say with crack you gotta keep doing it to keep that high. Well, that’s how fentanyl and heroin is. You’ve got to keep doing it all day to keep your high.”
Mike lighted up an Edgefield cigarette and gave her one. “With fentanyl,” he said, “you have to have it—”
“—or you get deathly sick,” Bree interrupted. “Say you do one in the morning, if you don’t have one by that afternoon you’re already sick. Within four to five hours.”
Public-health studies show that most users don’t want fentanyl; often, it’s cut into the drug they actually want (heroin, meth, cocaine, or prescription pills). Other times they’ll get fentanyl because nothing else is available, and they fear withdrawal. But according to the DEA’s 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment, the St. Louis area is a region where fentanyl has begun to displace heroin in much of the market: “This change is evidenced by fentanyl being sold as fentanyl and not disguised as heroin; a large opioid user base that actively seeks out fentanyl; an increase in fentanyl traffickers in the area; and a shift from overdose deaths caused by heroin/fentanyl combinations to overdose deaths caused by fentanyl alone.”
Bree overdosed on fentanyl about two years ago, before she met Mike. Again, she wanted heroin, but her heroin dealer had been murdered, so she needed a new supplier. An East Alton friend referred her to a guy from St. Louis, so she drove across the river and met him in an alley, near North Kingshighway Boulevard. He seemed trustworthy enough; tall, lanky, and in his early thirties. The problem was that he didn’t have heroin, he had only fentanyl. “I was just thinking it was a better high,” Bree recalled. “I said, ‘All right, let’s get it.’”
She bought fifteen “beans” for seventy dollars; “beans” is slang for gelatin capsules full of powder, which is how fentanyl is mostly distributed in St. Louis, as opposed to baggies of powder or pressed pills, which are preferred in other regions. She then drove back across the river. But she didn’t go home. Since she and her mother were having a fight, she was staying in nearby Granite City—where she and Mike are both from originally—at a hotel room her friend had rented. She settled in and got out her syringe. “I shot like two or three of the beans, and I was so high,” she said. “I took a couple Xanaxes.” But then she realized something distressing—her purse was missing. And so she and two friends who were also staying at the hotel hopped into her van and went out looking for it. Bree was driving.
After a bit she pulled over, “to kind of regroup and think,” parking in a QuikTrip gas station. She leaned her head on the steering wheel and promptly passed out. The fentanyl was much stronger than the heroin she usually took, and the combination with the Xanax pills was nearly lethal. This is a common way to overdose. Xanax is a member a class of drugs called benzodiazepines, which also includes Valium. Like opioids, benzodiazepines are sedatives, and the pair can be incredibly toxic in combination; rocker Tom Petty and rapper Lil Peep had both types of drug in their systems upon their deaths in the fall of 2017. Best-selling writer Michelle McNamara, author of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, also had benzodiazepines and opioids in her system upon her 2016 death—Xanax and fentanyl, both reportedly prescribed.
Bree’s two friends, perhaps worried about police finding them with an overdose victim, hopped out of the car. Someone called 911. The first responders administered naloxone on Bree, the lifesaving miracle drug marketed as Narcan, which reverses opioid overdoses. Three doses were needed before she came to. “They shot the adrenaline thing right there,” she said, tapping her chest plate. “They broke my collarbone working on me.” She woke up in Granite City’s Gateway Regional Medical Center. When she was released she found her purse. A different friend had taken it. “She acted like somebody else stole it, but she had it the whole time at her house,” Bree said. “It had $200 worth of Valium in there. That’s why she stole it.”
Even after this daunting experience, Bree wasn’t finished with fentanyl, returning repeatedly to St. Louis. The vice economy across the Mississippi River runs both ways. While St. Louisans traverse it for naked flesh, east siders come into town for their heroin or fentanyl, which can be procured with remarkable ease. “As soon as you go over the McKinley Bridge, you stop at one of them gas stations,” Bree said, adding that they tend to be prowled by dealers. “They’ll come up to anybody who’s parking, getting gas, even getting cigarettes. They’ll drive up to you and ask if you mess around. They give it to you for free. They give you samples first. One time we were over there and got about twenty-four of them for free, from like ten different guys.”
There’s one condition, however. You must have a working cell phone and give them your number. Soon they’ll be back in touch, ready to sell you your next batch. “They don’t give you time to really do it,” said Bree. “As soon as you pull off, they’re like, ‘How was it?’”