At his apartment, Dowson handed me a computer printout listing his company’s latest drugs. He enclosed it in a plastic sleeve and asked me not to remove it from the apartment. Compared to the previous list he had e-mailed me three months earlier, it had many changes, but in general the items listed remained obscure, little-known NPS with gibberish-sounding names, like AB-CHFUPYCA. I couldn’t begin to pronounce many of them.
I recognized some fentanyl analogues, including MAF and BUF-fentanyl, also known as benzoylfentanyl, an obscure analogue with no data about human use available. As the print-out noted, one kilogram of benzoylfentanyl sold for $2,400. The bulk pricing indicated that the intended clients for these chemicals weren’t individual users but drug distributors, such as I was pretending to be.
“What about ten kilograms, what would the cost be?” I asked.
“Ten kilograms, ten times [the price],” he said. “There is no discount.”
Also on his product list were stimulants, depressants, and more than a dozen varieties of synthetic cannabinoids, with names like MMB-Fubica and AMB-Chmica. These were the next generation of fake marijuana products since the banning of John William Huffman’s JWH series (China has scheduled at least nine JWH compounds)—or perhaps the next, next generation.
As I looked over the list, Dowson’s expression became increasingly concerned. “We are afraid that a reporter come to our lab, to our country, to find out why we synthesize these chemicals, or why we sell these chemicals to your country,” he said. “To let your people’s health down. To harm your country’s people. So, I wonder whether I should take you to our lab.”
Still harboring doubts about me, he decided we should talk more over lunch. After I respectfully declined his offer to treat me to McDonalds, we settled on a local restaurant near Shanghai University. I discreetly texted Jada our location, as best as I could make it out. As we continued getting to know each other, our conversation sometimes veered in bizarre directions. “Why US government not bomb North Korea?” he said, apropos of nothing. “It is not good. And they have big weapon. The US government should bomb it. It’s a responsibility. For the US, and also for China.” Mostly he expressed admiration for the United States, including the leadership abilities of Donald Trump. The Chinese would always be grateful to the United States for defending their country against Japan in the Second World War, he noted.
He asked about my specific reason for meeting him. I explained that I was here at the behest of a friend from the States who was an NPS distributor. He was interested in making bulk purchases of fentanyl analogues and other drugs, and had asked me to visit Dowson’s lab. If, according to my assessment, the lab had high enough quality standards, then my friend would go into business with him.
This explanation didn’t entirely satisfy Dowson.
Why didn’t he come himself?
“Because I was already planning to come to China, to visit a friend,” I said, improvising.
A friend? Where?
“In Wuhan,” I said, naming the city from which I’d arrived the previous night.
I’m from Wuhan! What part of Wuhan?
Pretending not to understand what he was saying, I excused myself to use the restroom. When I returned, we got on to something else, and somehow, by the time lunch was over, he had decided that I passed muster.
“We have friendship, I trust you,” he said, taking out his phone to call the beefy driver, who arrived shortly to take us to the lab. Soon we were back in the Chevy, speeding down a Shanghai interstate.
I was excited that he’d agreed to take me to his lab, but I was nervous that things might not go as planned. When I inquired about our destination, Dowson said only that the lab was “outside Shanghai.” I began to sweat. My GPS wasn’t functioning and the road signs were mostly in Mandarin, which I didn’t speak. The driver wove between lanes while Dowson peppered me with more questions.
Where in the USA are you from?
Where are you staying in Shanghai?
I was from New York and I was staying at the Bund Hotel, I said, again improvising. I was actually staying at a youth hostel, but didn’t want him to know my location.
In my anxiety I felt around for a seat belt, but there wasn’t one. I tried to track where we were going and surreptitiously texted the names of street exits and landmarks to Jada, in case something went horribly wrong. “Shangzhong Road Tunnel,” I typed, and “Sanlu Highway.” At one point I just typed, “Headed west I think.”
Though our time together so far had been friendly, Dowson had an inquisitive manner and seemed to grow increasingly skeptical of my identity. He had his sun visor down and kept glancing at me through its mirror.
Are you a reporter?
No, I said, putting on my poker face.
In 2010, China passed Japan to become the world’s second-biggest economy, along the way lifting hundreds of millions of its 1.4 billion people out of poverty. Its breakneck growth is revealed in everything from its bullet trains to its futuristic architecture. From China’s tech and electronics wizardry to its fashion and tourism industries, it betrays a strongly capitalist mind-set, and initiatives like Belt and Road, a Eurasian–African infrastructure project, reveal its international ambitions.
Despite its problematic human rights record, including the internment of minority Uighur residents, the growth, innovation, and sheer magnitude of China’s economic rise is unlike anything the world has seen, and a critical part of China’s economy is its sprawling chemical industry. Its four hundred thousand chemical manufacturers and distributors (by US Department of State estimates) span the country, making everything from fertilizers to industrial solvents to antibiotics to psychoactive drugs. Most operate legally, some operate illegally, and others are in between. About 40 percent of the legitimate chemical industry worldwide is based in China, according to estimates, and it created $100 billion in profits in 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
“Basically, almost any chemical that you want can be made in China,” said Jean-François Tremblay, former Hong Kong–based senior correspondent for Chemical &. Engineering News. He believes government subsidies, cheap land prices, and a lower standard of environmental and worker-safety regulations have fueled the industry over the years, buttressed by a plethora of skilled chemists and chemical engineers. And China’s chemists have got an enormous market to sell to—the world’s largest population. “For many years they had to produce their own drugs, until the end of the Cultural Revolution,” Tremblay added.
Much of China’s economic expansion in recent decades, however, has been driven by exports, which are seen as critical to the country’s continued growth. It exports more goods to the United States than any other country—about $505 billion in 2017, over three times more than China imported from the United States—an imbalance that sparked President Trump’s trade war with the country.
Driven in part by government subsidies and incentive programs, and fueled by exports, China’s pharmaceutical industry has been growing at a breakneck pace for decades, especially since the normalization of US–China relations in 2000. Though previously the vast majority of medicinal and vitamin active ingredients came from the West and Japan, today China is known as the pharmacy to the world. But it’s also been under fire for years for its record on food and medicine safety. Its medicines and supplements have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations around the world (exact numbers are unknown). The culprits have ranged from adulterated baby formula to fake glycerin used in cold medicine to contaminated herapin, a blood thinner. These adulterations are sometimes the results of company cost-cutting or corruption. Most dramatically, in 2007 China executed the former head of its State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, who was found guilty of accepting $850,000 worth of bribes from medical-device makers and drug companies. He approved more than one hundred drugs that were either entirely fake or hadn’t been properly reviewed, including an antibiotic that killed at least ten people.
In 2013 the agency was restructured and renamed the China Food and Drug Administration. Corrupt factories were closed, and reforms were promised. But inspections remain sporadic, and American officials have not been satisfied.
For a variety of reasons, Chinese companies making medicines tend not to be inspected as thoroughly as those in Western countries. Though the US FDA has a presence in China, as it does in many other countries around the world, and is permitted to do some (though not all) of its desired inspections, it is, by all accounts, understaffed and underfunded. A report about drugs and China commissioned by the US Congress noted “several recorded instances of Chinese law enforcement and drug regulators delaying visa approvals for FDA officials and deleting laboratory test records.”
China’s clumsy, understaffed bureaucracy has a difficult time controlling the country’s chemical industry, where legal and illegal elements bleed into each other. Different layers of government are sometimes at odds with one another, local officials are corruptible, and industry regulations are confusing and poorly enforced. Thus, dodgy companies that keep their heads down can often operate without problems. Many have websites advertising legitimate products, while also making recreational chemicals. Chemsky’s home page, for example, focuses on its legitimate offerings, while its illicit offerings can be found by searching the site.
“Lack of coordination and competing regulatory oversight … creates opportunities for some firms to hide unregulated activities in plain sight,” testified the RAND Corporation’s Bryce Pardo, an expert on drugs in China, to Congress in 2018.
While American chemical and pharmaceutical companies tend to portray themselves as focused and streamlined, many of their Chinese counterparts offer an extraordinary range of products. Regulating this industry—where chemicals that speed up rubber manufacturing and those combating erectile dysfunction are peddled by the same people—is complicated by the fact that China’s chemical bureaucracy involves at least eight different agencies, including its Food and Drug Administration, Ministry of Chemical Industry, and General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine.
Because there are so many regulatory agencies, and because so many chemical companies make both legitimate and illicit products, the Chinese government has a difficult time finding and penalizing those who break the law.
“Many of China’s chemical production facilities are described as ‘semi-legitimate’ producers, which are allowed to make chemicals but unlicensed to sell them to pharmaceutical companies,” reads a 2016 report from the congressional US–China Economic and Security Review Commission. Being unlicensed doesn’t necessarily stop these producers from selling to pharmaceutical companies, however. To further deceive the government, some companies set up “shadow factories,” facilities shown to inspectors that are not actually where their drugs are made.
Fentanyl-precursor manufacturers, for example, can evade scrutiny by labeling their products as industrial chemicals instead of pharmaceutical ones. “As long as, in China, you can produce chemicals without serious supervision,” said Kai Pflug, a management consultant in the Chinese chemical industry, “the problem will persist.”
Few people seem to understand the laws governing the manufacture and sale of Chinese chemicals. Long and complicated ordinances are enacted at the whim of the central government, and then enforcement often falls to regional agencies, who may not fully understand what Beijing has commanded or may have their own, competing interests. Chemical companies manipulate the large amount of gray area to their own advantage to reap profits.
His mood now improved as we approached our destination, Dowson sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” as we exited off the interstate. We had driven about a half hour south of Shanghai’s center, and Dowson referred to our current location as the “countryside.” The description didn’t seem fitting; bare plots of land littered with garbage sat adjacent to clusters of colossal high-rises. Perhaps, given the frenetic pace of Chinese development, this location actually was the countryside not long before.
We eventually pulled into the parking lot of an office park, ringed by boxy, anonymous buildings a few stories high. A fountain sat in the middle. There was no way to tell, from the outside, that the building we were about to enter housed not a mail-processing plant or a grocery chain warehouse but a drug laboratory.
“Our lab is in here. We have arrived, man!” Dowson said, adding that I was not permitted to take pictures. I kept my smartphone recording inside my rain jacket.
We exited the car; the beefy driver stayed in his seat. The building’s interior paint was blue and gray, and the stairwells smelled of concrete; the building seemed of fairly recent construction. Dowson said they had been at the facility for five years. He led me up two flights of stairs, ducking in for a quick word with someone in a room full of what looked like salespeople. The third floor harbored the laboratory—actually a series of lab rooms with chemical-processing equipment. Almost all the windows were open, but the frigid wind wasn’t enough to dissipate the strong chemical smell.
Dowson introduced me to his partner, whose name I didn’t catch. Though Dowson himself seemed like a guy who would have been popular in school, his partner resembled a stereotypical science nerd, with broad gum lines and a slightly embarrassed manner. He was thirty and, like Dowson, wore glasses.
“We were at the same school, but not the same grade, in Shanghai,” Dowson said. “He also liked the cannabinoid business. So we worked together.”
His partner seemed suspicious of me but didn’t object as Dowson showed off the facilities, which consisted of about a dozen rooms. Most were labs, full of the types of glassware and equipment that anyone who took high school chemistry would be familiar with: beakers, tubes, funnels, scales, and industrial-scale machines whose functions weren’t immediately clear. Black lab tables sat in the rooms’ centers, and fume hoods lined the walls. One machine, about six feet high, was used for drying the chemicals, Dowson explained. Posted signs, in both Chinese and English, warned the chemists to always wear gloves and protective eyewear.
The facilities might not have passed muster at some American academic or industry labs. Some of the equipment was rusting, and some of the glassware was dirty or coated with yellowing aluminum foil that was peeling off. “We have bought several older machines from other chemists, because it’s cheap,” Dowson apologized. That said, the facilities didn’t seem unsafe. There was a level of professionalism.
“I seldom synthesize now, but five years ago, I synthesized,” Dowson said, referencing the work of chemical manufacture. “I did the reaction. But the smell is bad when you synthesize.” His partner, along with the four chemists they had on staff, did the bulk of the heavy-lifting in the lab these days. I didn’t see anyone actively monitoring the equipment, but some of the machines were running. In the first room, a viscous, yellow, custardy-looking compound in an oversize, round-bottomed flask was being stirred by a mechanical arm. It looked to be, perhaps, three or four gallons of mixture.
“This is BUF,” Dowson said, referring to benzoylfentanyl, the fentanyl analogue from the print-out he showed me in his apartment. “When this is finished we will get one kilo. It’s legal in Europe, such as Belgium. Belgium customers need BUF. We wonder if Chinese will ban this, so we do not make too many stock. When it becomes a banned item, we will throw out the stock.” Next to it whirred an identical machine, stirring an identical mixture.
Throughout our conversation Dowson, speaking for himself and translating for his partner, stressed that Chemsky preferred to operate within the boundaries of the law, both in China and the countries where they sent their drugs. Unlike other, illicit Chinese chemical concerns, they didn’t disguise their chemicals with false packaging or label them with fake product names, he claimed.
In truth, though he knew Chinese drug law to the letter, the legality of the chemicals abroad didn’t seem to concern him all that much. When we spoke about different synthetic cannabinoids and fentanyl analogues, for example, he often had no idea which ones were legal where. He asked me if MAF was legal in the United States, for example; it wasn’t.
Dowson clearly understood the dangerous nature of these chemicals. At his apartment, he had spelled out, very plainly, what he thought of the compounds that were his livelihood, the ones that funded the posh abode we were then sitting in.
“These chemicals harm people,” he said. “No safe. Because they are not green. They are synthesized by people in labs. They are harmful. They are drug. Every drug have harmful, and side effect. Right?”
As we entered the next lab room at the facility, I could hardly believe my eyes. Dowson covered his mouth and nose with his jacket to block fumes wafting from a yellow powder lying in big piles on the lab station island.
In the movie Scarface, near the end, Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino, powder on his lapel, sits at his desk before heaps of cocaine. That was child’s play compared to this. The sheer volume had to be enough to get entire small countries high. The piles of compound were on sheets of aluminum foil, perhaps for drying; more mounds were on the floor, and small barrels were filled with one-kilogram ziplock bags of the substance.
“5F-ADB,” Dowson said, identifying the yellow chemical, a synthetic cannabinoid that his printout noted sold for $1,000 per kilogram. (“Avoid from light, in cool and dry place,” it advised.) This drug was popular in the Netherlands, he claimed. Presumably the buyers—or someone else further along the supply chain—would dissolve the chemicals in a solvent and spray them onto dried plant matter for smoking.
In the next room he showed off the equipment used for manufacturing the cannabinoid, huge, glass drums suspended in the air, each holding maybe twenty gallons. He pointed to a cardboard box filled with bags of a different compound, white with an orange tint. “These are 5F-MDMB-2201. It’s famous in Russia. Russian customers like this.” It hadn’t caught on much further west, however, and curious Internet commentators complained about a dearth of available information. “It’s highly potent, showing activity in sub-milligram dosages,” wrote someone on Drugs-Forum.com. “Apparently this one becomes very intense and sometimes difficult and scary for the cannabinoid-naive or even more experienced individuals.”
These new drugs become popular on the Internet in the same way many new products become popular—by word of mouth. The NPS landscape is evolving so fast that it’s often hard to know where the new chemicals originate. Many are taken directly from legitimate academic research, such as the N-bombs developed by David Nichols and the synthetic cannabinoids conceived by John William Huffman. But New Zealand chemist Matt Bowden, who has made synthetic cannabinoids and other NPS, said that after he started manufacturing in China, his formulas were simply stolen by local chemists.
“You couldn’t really protect the IP,” he said. “We found a few times that if one guy was working on something, he’d go down the road to his friend from uni, and they’d have a go at it together. Then the guy down the road would think, ‘Hey, that’s a cool molecule, I’m going to start making this myself,’ and he’d start selling it somewhere else.” A chemist who designs new psychedelics said that, after he and other participants on a Russian-language psychonaut message board had too many of their new drug creations hijacked by Chinese labs and sold on the Internet, they closed the forum to outsiders.
The tour finished, we sat down at a table in a small, unadorned conference room. Another man came in with a plastic bag full of water bottles and Nescafe cans, the latter of which were, to Dowson’s delight, warm. The man left the room and closed the door. Dowson, his partner, and I popped open our cans of sugary coffee and made more small talk. Finally, Dowson got down to business.
“We will find chemicals, new or old, that are suitable for USA. The work will be done by you and your workmate,” he said, pausing to translate for his partner. “What quantity?”
“Maybe ten kilograms for some things, one kilogram for other things,” I said, talking hypothetically.
They looked dubious. Then I remembered that, with some of these chemicals, one needed less than a grain of rice’s worth to get high. “The ten kilograms per month is a lot of work,” Dowson said.
“I will speak with my partner,” I said, “and then we will speak again.”
This seemed to satisfy them. “So, any questions? If you don’t have any questions, we’re done.”
We walked outside to the hallway and waited for the elevator. After a few minutes it was still stuck on a floor labeled “-1,” so we took the stairs down. The beefy man had the Chevy ready to go. While he drove us back to Shanghai, from the back seat I took notes about the visit and e-mailed them to myself. We wove back into the city center, and they dropped me off at the Bund Hotel.
Dowson said goodbye, repeating his recommendations for tourist spots. It was still raining, and he insisted that I take his umbrella. I watched the Chevy pull away, took a deep breath, and texted Jada that I was OK. Then I started figuring out how to get back to my youth hostel.
I soon stopped contacting Dowson, and he never pressed me about the order we discussed. Months after my trip when I was back home, however, he sent me a Skype message on my birthday with a cake emoji.
This infiltration helped me understand the scale and the scope of the NPS trade in China. A small company like Chemsky, with only a handful of employees, was producing chemicals on a large scale—compounds that, for the most part, didn’t exist until recently, and about which little was known. And they were flying beneath the radar of law enforcement agencies everywhere. No government on earth would want these drugs in its country, and yet the latest technology was facilitating their creation, marketing, and distribution.
Despite the illicit nature of these drugs, Chemsky is a fairly credible business. It doesn’t operate out of a disguised underground bunker but rather a traditional office park. Dowson and his colleagues understand chemistry, Internet advertising, and Chinese chemical law, and their output seemed especially large for a modest-size operation, if the piles of cannabinoids were any indication. They point toward a worldwide market for obscure chemicals that is bigger than I had even imagined.
And if the number of NPS ads on the Internet is any indication, Chemsky is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds more Chinese companies could be making these drugs in labs like this one.
Still, companies like Chemsky—which send NPS through the mail—are only part of the problem. Even if all of their drugs could be intercepted, this wouldn’t stop the overdoses and deaths in the West, because literally tons of fentanyl is distributed on the street by Mexican cartels, an amount that is expected to increase in the coming years. This fentanyl is almost always made from Chinese precursors.
Experts agree that the precursors are key to the cartels’ operations. “So long as the cartels can obtain the necessary chemicals, they will be able to synthesize the drugs that permit them to bribe officials, buy weapons and pay their gunmen,” wrote Scott Stewart on the website Stratfor. And, unlike fentanyl analogues, all of which China banned in the spring of 2019, most fentanyl precursors remain perfectly legal in China.
I clearly needed to better understand the Chinese precursor trade. It had taken only a few keystrokes to find operations that were selling these chemicals openly on the Internet. But as I continued digging I realized that—unlike the NPS sold by Chemsky and others—the fentanyl precursors being sold to the cartels and others didn’t seem to come from small to medium-size companies scattered around China.
The bulk of them seemed to come from a single corporation.