high_as_fxck_GER is a drug dealer from Germany. Over the Dark Web, he sells magic mushrooms, DMT, and 25I-NBOMe, shipping out packages all over the globe. He clears about 500 euros per week from these sales, and once in a while a special order comes in worth many multiples of that.
He thinks his customers like N-bombs because they don’t show up on drug tests, and he doesn’t seem especially concerned about the health risks. “The deaths I heard about happened because people think it was lsd or cocaine and overdosed,” he wrote me. “With safer use it is as safe as all other drugs.”
In 2015, barely out of high school, he began selling hashish and marijuana on the street. His customers started asking about harder drugs, and so he started buying psychedelics off the Dark Web and selling them in person. He was arrested by local police a couple of times, and his customers left, so he moved his business exclusively to the Dark Web. He doesn’t use drugs himself, he said.
He worries about the police constantly, but enjoys the image and lifestyle of Dark Web dealing. With his earnings he was able to get a driver’s license (which are very expensive in Germany) and a car.
His girlfriend knows about his profession, but she doesn’t mind. “Maybe she love the bad boy style XD,” he wrote, using the emoticon symbolizing uproarious laughter.
Much of the fentanyl sold in the United States comes into the country from Mexico, where China-synthesized chemicals are processed, cut with impurities, and packaged by Mexican cartels and sent up through border crossings. But that’s not the case with different varieties (i.e., analogues) of fentanyl and other novel psychoactive substances (NPS). They are moved mainly through the Dark Web, a technology essential to the new drug economy. In an era when the National Security Agency has vast monitoring powers over American citizens, the Dark Web serves as a sort of a technological shield, allowing users and dealers to conduct transactions in relative confidence and anonymity.
high_as_fxck_GER was one of many Dark Web dealers I talked to, either by encrypted message, over e-mail, or in person. They discussed how their businesses operated, both on logistic and moral levels. They almost all trade in Bitcoin, the near-anonymous cyber currency. Logging onto the Dark Web is very easy to do, even on a smartphone, through the use of a browser called Tor, which disguises the user’s IP address. The URLs of the Dark Web drug markets themselves—gobbledygook strings of numbers and letters—can be obtained from sites accessible on the surface web such as Deep Dot Web.
Many of these markets, and the vendors operating on them, run sophisticated and lucrative operations. A Brazilian vendor called Mr. Pills sells its wares on numerous markets, advertising itself as a “Worldwide Drug Service.” Mr. Pills sends packages to customers anywhere, but doesn’t offer refunds to people in the United States, Indonesia, Russia, Finland, or South Korea, likely because delivery is considered riskiest to those countries, owing to factors ranging from strength of law enforcement to severity of punishment.
Like many other drug vendors on the Dark Web, Mr. Pills seeks to set the minds of potential customers at ease, portraying its operations as professional and safe on its description page:
Who We Are? A clan of Brazilian traders with a mission to export the very best quality products for the most demanding customers in the world, with the maximum safety and ethical description. Why You Should Buy Here? Quality, in first place. We only commercialize products with over 9X% UP purity and without any additives or mixtures. We take very seriously the security. We have a long experience sending drugs. In those years, we adopted techniques anti-dog and imperceptibly x-ray guarantee, taking all safety and description in sending as possible.
Many emporiums are operated by skilled sales staff people who don’t seem to have ethical qualms about what they are doing. An operator at a market called French Connection claimed the site is “good and honest,” and he doesn’t see any issues with selling fentanyl. “It is like morphine … if well diluted no more risk than other opiate.”
A market called Majestic Garden specializes in psychedelics and has banned opioids and other drugs it believes are dangerous. Its community of users say they have a moral mission.
“We are not normal criminals,” said one site regular who asked not to be named. “We are advocates of the prohibited psychedelic medicines and only do this illegally because since the late 1960’s these medicines have been illegal. In all truth, humans have 1000s of years of history growing and learning from psychedelic medicines. We do not allow addictive drugs and are advocates of safe and responsible use of the psychedelic medicines offered. We are also advocates of the professional research of psychedelic medicines and eventual legalization.”
In mid-2017 a Dark Web market called Hansa was suddenly shut down. Visitors saw this message:
The Dutch National Police have located Hansa Market and taken over control of this marketplace since June 20, 2017. We have modified the source code, which allowed us to capture passwords, PGP-encrypted order information, IP-addresses, Bitcoins and other relevant information that may help law enforcement agencies worldwide to identify users of this marketplace.
Netherlands law enforcement had been working with the FBI as part of a sting called Operation Bayonet, which also seized AlphaBay a couple of weeks earlier. AlphaBay had grown to become the largest market on the Dark Web, selling drugs, stolen credit card numbers, and guns, and generating more than a billion dollars’ worth of transactions. A phalanx of international agencies joined forces to take the market down, arresting a twenty-five-year-old Canadian, Alexandre Cazes, who was living in Thailand and was found dead in a Thai jail cell a week later. (Officials say he took his own life.)
As a result, paranoia swept Dark Web drug vendors, who nervously chatted in private and on message boards about the possibility of law enforcement officials lurking in the remaining markets. This perhaps partly explained why an American vendor I contacted wasn’t initially anxious to talk. His clever web name was U4IA, and I first messaged him on a site called Wall St. Market, where I had seen one of his ads. “Novel Opioid. Limited quantity. 99.7% pure. $60g,” it said.
I hoped to ease his mind by using an encryption program called PGP, which encodes messages and makes them harder for law enforcement to read. PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy.” I probably came on a bit strong, however, asking him how potent his opioids were and where he sourced them from.
“Your kind of making me leery with all your digging,” he responded.
I apologized and explained that I was a journalist writing a book about new synthetic drugs—chemicals that imitate traditional drugs like heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, and LSD, except they are even more dangerous. If he were still willing to talk to me, I would really appreciate it.
To my surprise, he was. “I actually wouldn’t mind a voice,” he wrote. “I feel people like me are unfairly classified as degenerate scum. (Although many are.)”
Indeed, U4IA sells some incredibly powerful fentanyls, which he sources from Chinese labs. He agreed to speak over Wickr, a messaging app that is more secure than sending text messages. He bought a burner phone, specifically for the purpose of contacting me. Over the coming months, he told his story.
U4IA has been selling drugs on and off since age sixteen, mainly to pay for his own habits. Back then he was hooked on coke and meth, which made him do crazy things. One night he smoked crack and walked into a bar. “I saw some dude dancing on my ex and didn’t say a word just walked over and cleaned his clock,” he wrote. Another time he and some associates robbed a crack dealer in the crack dealer’s own house. Eventually U4IA’s crimes caught up with him, and he did more than a year for robbery.
The stimulants made him feel paranoid and antisocial. But then he discovered synthetic opioids. Out of curiosity, he tried one called U-47700—originally created by Upjohn in the mid-1970s as a morphine alternative, it never received FDA approval—and everything changed. It was like an “antidepressant,” he said. “I felt whole, confident, and happy, very little stress.”
Soon he was fully addicted, adding to a stressful existence that also included a mortgage, child support for two kids, and about $10,000 in debt. His day job didn’t cover everything. “I promised I wouldn’t let my drug addiction cause my children to live in poverty,” he said.
The Dark Web offered him a chance to move beyond selling marijuana and Molly to local kids. “There’s more money, obviously, in a global market than a small-town market,” he said.
U4IA hesitated at first when I asked to meet him in person. He didn’t know that I wasn’t a cop. But as our Wickr conversation entered its third month, I learned something new: he was a hip-hop fan. As the author of two books about rap music, it was a subject I could talk about. I sent him clippings about my latest, Original Gangstas, a biography of West Coast rappers like N.W.A and Tupac Shakur.
“Did Suge Knight kill Tupac?” he asked, referencing the owner of Tupac’s record label.
“Nah,” I said. “It was almost certainly the guy Tupac beat up that night, Orlando Anderson, or a member of his crew.”
Somehow, this bit of insight won him over. He insisted I couldn’t mention his location, or his real name, which sounded reasonable. He sent me the name of his town, which was driving distance from mine. And then, separately, he sent the location where we would meet. Our rendezvous was set for the next day, at 1:45 p.m., at a burger chain called Culver’s.
The leaves on the trees ringing Culver’s parking lot were just starting to turn when U4IA emerged from his truck in the parking lot: he had bulging muscles under his white T-shirt, camo pants, and piercing eyes. I was surprised to see he was carrying his baby daughter. She wore overalls, with big eyes and a smile.
We went inside, and he picked the most remote booth available, away from the largely elderly crowd. Sitting in a high chair, his daughter was in a great mood, giggling when he teased her with a french fry and pulled it away as she grabbed for it.
We spoke in hushed tones and soon got down to business. He told me that in the past he’d sold fentanyl, U-47700, and carfentanil, and had recently started selling methoxyacetylfentanyl, a fentanyl analogue also known as MAF. He had been selling this new product for only a few days but had already made a couple thousand dollars. Procuring it was remarkably easy. He hadn’t even needed the Dark Web. All he had to do was search on a Chinese surface-web site called Weiku.com, which is based in Hangzhou and sells everything from household items to illicit chemicals. Immediately, a long list of vendors had popped up. He picked one, and they made a one-off deal: $500 for fifty grams of MAF, which was legal in China.
They spoke English in their communications, and the package arrived soon in the mail. Completely inconspicuous, it resembled a household cleaner, along the lines of Ajax. “It looked like you could pull it off a store shelf,” he said. “You’d have to open it up to really see what was in there.” (A Weiku representative told the New York Times that fentanyl wasn’t permitted to be sold on the site, but that sellers got around this by slightly changing the search term.)
The product was extremely potent. To make a nasal spray solution—a popular method for ingesting some opioids—he needed only tiny crumbs of the drug, 0.001 grams per milliliter of water, he said, plucking a couple crumbs off his burger bun and placing them on the table to illustrate. When he sells it on the Dark Web, he charges sixty dollars for a five milliliter bottle. One spray, he said, is the equivalent of one OxyContin pill. It’s an incredible markup; at that ratio, $500 worth of product could potentially make him $600,000, though he said he had made only about $2,000 so far.
His nasal sprayer was a small white bottle with a custom-made label reading: “Alpha Prescription Strength Nasal Cleanser and Decongestant.” Below, in smaller letters, it said:
*Shake vigorously before each use and keep out of reach of children.
It resembled a common drugstore product. For his addiction, he said, he uses his nasal spray every four hours or so. He needs a hit to be able get out of bed in the morning. Without it, he couldn’t go to work to support his daughters, he said. He sees what he is doing as a public service for addicted users. “It’s substantially cheaper for an opiate addict than supporting your habit other ways,” he said. “By offering a cost-friendly solution, it keeps a user from committing crimes that hurt the innocent.”
As he elaborates on his Dark Web page: “We should not have to spend 100s everyday just to get by and live a normal life because of an addiction that was put on a lot of us by the government or big pharma,” referring to pharmaceutical companies that downplayed addiction risks while drawing billions in profit.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for his argument and for those with crippling, expensive addictions. However, U4IA’s nasal sprays are high risk, argues the moderator of an online forum devoted to fentanyl, who asked that his name not be used. Properly preparing a fentanyl analogue nasal spray is extremely complicated, requiring compounds barely visible to the eye to be measured using a process called volumetric dosing, which requires them to be dissolved in liquid.
“People who are buying the spray assume that this person has the expertise to make a spray that won’t kill them,” the moderator wrote. “With pharmaceuticals, that expertise is well regulated, but … here there is no regulation, no quality control, and therefore if you buy this product you must absolutely trust this random stranger not to kill you. I don’t know about you, but there is no way I would ever put that much trust in another individual.”
“If it’s not safe [I] will be the first one to hit the ground,” said U4IA, when I relate the concerns of the moderator of the online fentanyl forum. “Because it is all tested not with equipment but with willing human subjects, [myself] included.”
Many Dark Web dealers receive their Chinese NPS through a third-party intermediary, the same way Portland fentanyl kingpin Brandon Hubbard got his from Quebec prisoner Daniel Vivas Ceron, for example. Some, however, purchase their chemicals directly from connections in China, including one named Desifelay1000, a dealer whom I met on the now-defunct Dark Web site Pyramid.
Desifelay1000 comes from an Eastern European country he prefers not to mention and now lives in an eastern US city he prefers not to name. He loves Mary J. Blige, Grey’s Anatomy, and playing soccer, and has a wry sense of humor. After being told that, owing to journalistic ethics, I couldn’t pay him for an interview or buy his carfentanil, he responded, “I don’t care about ethics. I’m a drug dealer.”
He grew up fast, first trying China White when he was a teenager in New York. He began selling drugs on the street and went to jail for a stretch. Now in his late twenties, he started selling carfentanil and ketamine powder on a handful of Dark Web sites in 2016. Carfentanil, the veterinary tranquilizer that is one hundred times more potent than fentanyl, is measured in micrograms, and a nonlethal amount can barely be seen. He wouldn’t go into the specifics of how he prepares the highly potent drug for sale, but said he chooses to sell carfentanil because a little goes a long way. “It is expensive and a single sale put much money in my hands,” he said, adding that a gram starts at $800 and that his average order is about three grams.
He wakes up at 3:30 a.m. to facilitate sales from Europe and countries farther east. He gets orders from all over the world and will sell to almost anyone, although not if they are from Indonesia, as he finds its drug punishments particularly draconian: drug traffickers there can be sentenced to death. The Dark Web is more lucrative than street dealing, and products sell faster, he noted, but he’s constantly worried that one of his buyers will be a DEA agent in disguise.
He does a brisk business. “You know about Bitcoins? That is the best means of payment but I also do Paypal, Moneygram and Western Union,” he said. He even accepts cash. Payment is required before delivery, and once he has the money in hand he can get the product to US customers within twenty-four to thirty hours, he brags.
He employs four people. “The most important characteristic for a successful worker is honesty, ’cause I can’t exactly take my case to court,” he said. “They’re mostly people formerly in the same line of business. Three have records.” While a criminal past might be disqualifying for many jobs, Desifelay1000 actually prefers it. Someone who is “compromised”—in violation of their parole, for example—is less likely to go to the cops.
Two of his employees are stationed far afield, in Europe and Africa, where they do cash pickups in their specific regions. But most of his clients are from the United States. “Multiracial, every gender, mostly rich,” he said, when asked to characterize his customers. “You will be surprised how many rich people use the product. I mean it ain’t cheap.”
He noted that one regular client, “a really rich man in Ohio,” said he is suffering from AIDS, and that carfentanil brings him pain relief.
The practice of shipping dangerous drugs through the mail—which is used by Desifelay1000, U4IA, high_as_fxck_GER, and countless other Dark Web dealers—is both brazen and common.
US Customs has made intercepting drug packages sent in the mail a top priority, recently increasing international mail facility staffing by 20 percent. In October 2018 the United States announced it was withdrawing from an international postal agreement allowing for inexpensive shipments from China, which the Trump administration said helped facilitate fentanyl sales.
With the help of sniffer dogs and advanced technology, including “lasers” that can scan unopened packages for specific drugs, more and more packages of NPS are being caught. And yet, considering more than 400 million international packages arrive in the United States every year, checking each one for drugs is logistically impossible. Customs intercepts only a tiny fraction.
Almost no one doubts that China is the starting point for most of these packages, a judgment underscored by the fact that when China schedules a drug, seizures in America plummet, a correlation that doesn’t hold true when the United States or the United Nations schedules a drug.
Chinese officials, however, remain skeptical. “China doesn’t deny that shipments to the U.S. happen, but there isn’t the proof to show how much—whether it’s 20 percent or 80 percent,” Yu Haibin, director of precursor chemical control of China’s Narcotics Control Commission, said in December 2017. He added that American officials had sent him information on only a half dozen fentanyl packages in the previous year.
A US Senate subcommittee report released in 2018 focused on six specific Chinese online sellers. They used shipping companies like FedEx and UPS to send $230,000 worth of fentanyls directly to American homes. When the markup was considered, the resale value of the drugs was in the hundreds of millions, the report stated.
The report found that it is extraordinarily easy to order and receive these chemicals from China, but determining who is sending them is difficult. The US Postal Service receives what is known as “advanced electronic data”—including the sender’s name and address—from about half the packages sent from China to America. But many Chinese bundles are diverted through other countries before being sent on to the United States, a process known as “transshipment.” These packages still go through customs, but because they do not come directly from China, sellers believe they are less likely to be scrutinized.
China has pledged to aid the United States in this matter. The country has a long way to go, according to anecdotal accounts. A Chinese synthetic-marijuana dealer named GN, who operates on a social media app popular in China called WeChat, said that sending drugs through the Chinese mail is easy, even when identification is necessary. “We have our people in the postal companies. They are pretty loose with the security.”
Shanghai-based reporter Erika Kinetz spoke not long ago to a new synthetic-drugs dealer who said he and his associates “lie to customs all the time.” Getting packages through was a breeze, he told her. “They would have the paperwork filled out really badly. Or they’d use an English name instead of a Chinese name, so then that person becomes basically untraceable. Or they’d only put a family name. And it’s like, ‘Oh, Mr. Wang, great. How are we going to find him?’” One “fail-safe” delivery option, vendors told her, was EMS, a service of the state-owned China Post.
Desifelay1000 gets his carfentanil from China. He hooked up with his current supplier through referrals—consumers of the drug he knew from the United States—and traveled to China himself to seal the deal. There, he met his “conduit,” a man paid a fee for making the introduction to a supplier. The conduit spoke a little English and served as his translator. Eventually he was taken to the supplier’s lab. It was disguised, in an isolated area. Some Chinese labs produce both legitimate and illegal drugs, but this one made only illegal ones, he said, for markets in the United States, India, and Europe. The supplier claimed the carfentanil was top quality, and Desifelay1000 sampled a tiny quantity himself to be sure. He was satisfied, and they agreed to do business together.
He left the country with a positive feeling, and since then has found everyone he’s worked with from China to be a good business partner. He trusts these partners more “than our own compatriots,” he said. “The trust level with the Chinese is higher. I believe it is because they are poorer and generally really wanna sell, unlike Americans, most of whom are scammers.”
A kilo of carfentanil from Chinese wholesalers can be bought for around $3,000, which breaks down to $3 per gram. Considering Desifelay1000 sells a gram for $800, his profit ratio is extremely high. But things became more complicated for him in March, 2017, when, under pressure from the United States, China scheduled carfentanil, along with three other fentanyl analogues. This spooked Desifelay1000’s supplier. “Transportation within China is much more difficult now,” he said. “They are quite worried about being caught.” The takedown of behemoth Dark Web market AlphaBay in July 2017 affected him too, wiping out 25 percent of his sales, he estimated, and China’s recent pledge to crack down on fentanyl analogues also worried some of his suppliers. But business remains profitable.
“I know I am harming some people,” he admitted. “I am not proud of it. I really just do this for cash. I ain’t stupid but I gotta make a living.” He wouldn’t say whether any of his clients had overdosed.
He hopes to transition to another career someday, something legitimate. Maybe he’ll enlist in computer-training classes. For now, the job places huge stress upon him—the fear of prison, and the difficulties that come with living a double life. He tells most people he works in construction. There are very few who know his real story. “If I get caught then it is jail time,” he said. “I trust no one.”