I would love to see you in Manhattan for the East Coast premiere of my film Antagonist: How a Wonder Drug Got Sidelined, May 20, 2026, at the Tribeca Screening Room. Tickets are free but it’s a small venue so you should register here to save your spot. Before the show I’ll be in conversation with Percy Menzies, the documentary’s title character, and doctors Adam Bisaga and Nikej Shah, who are also featured in the film. If you can’t attend you can also watch the film via our Patreon, but it would be much more fun to see you in person!

P.S. For members of the New York media there’s also a special event about naltrexone for alcohol on May 19, so holler if you’re interested in that.

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Editor’s note: Earlier this month the controversial hip-hop legend Afrika Bambaataa died from complications related to prostate cancer. He faced highly-credible accusations that he molested many young boys. But, as shown in this long form investigation, Bambaataa’s atrocities run much deeper. He was closely associated with a Georgia-based cult leader accused of running a vast pedophilia ring, and Bambaataa similarly positioned himself as a “God” to suppress his crimes.

Lance Taylor was a young warlord. The doughy Bronx River Projects teenager wore a hand-sewn denim jacket that bore the insignia of his clique, called the Black Spades, one of the South Bronx’s most fearsome gangs.

Before he was known as Afrika Bambaataa, he was a young boy growing up in the Throgs Neck neighborhood, hunting rabbits along the Bronx River waterway with a bow and arrow. But by the early 1970s he was taking his duties within the Black Spades seriously. Tasked with expanding the gang’s reach and influence, he helped them gain new territory in the borough, where almost every block was claimed by one gang or another.

“Little wars could start if you just looked at another person or woman wrong, or you stepped on somebody’s sneaker,” Taylor said in the book Yes, Yes, Y’all.

Having studied the battle plans of tacticians like Napoleon and Shaka Zulu, Taylor marched groups of young men into new territory in the Bronx and beyond. “I could rally up 3-400 at one time and move on you,” he said in Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.

Were the Black Spades a force for good or evil? Depends on whom you asked. Taylor noted that they kept the peace in their neighborhoods, organized voter drives, and even held bake sales to benefit locals whose homes had burned down.

But the Spades could be brutal, like the time they hunted down a trans prostitute called Miss Jocelyn, raped her with a broom, and beat her to death. According to a New York Times profile in 1972, other street gangs considered the Black Spades to be “ultraviolent.” “The Spades just want to fight, but we want to make peace,” said Ted Gonzalez of the Seven Immortals.

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Emily Dufton is a Maryland-based drugs historian who appears in my documentary Antagonist (which screens in New York next month!) and steals the show. She’s also the author of a new banger, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, which is the definitive book on medicine for opioid addiction.

It’s got big scoops, most notably about how the company making Suboxone used the same playbook (and even the same salespeople) as Purdue Pharma, the company that got us into this mess.

The book comes out next week and is now available. I talked to her about how Richard Nixon unfairly gets a bad rap, whether or not we should get rid of the methadone clinic system, and why a nonagenarian former drug czar was mean to her.

When you were a young girl, did you dream of being a drugs historian?

Yes. I drew pictures of horses and thought to myself, “Someday I’m going to resurrect the reputation of Richard Nixon’s presidential administration.”

Ha! Nixon certainly does get a bad rap, and when it comes to promoting treatment for drug abuse, rather than just incarceration, he doesn’t get any credit at all.

Right, exactly. We like using Richard Nixon as a punching bag. And I get it; he certainly seemed like an untrustworthy individual. But he was behind the liberalization of American drug policy, so many years after Harry Anslinger created a very prohibitionist world. After the first two years of Nixon’s first term, he actually created a period of detente in the war on drugs. Treatment and rehabilitation programs were more readily available, and there was more federal emphasis on that than law enforcement and arrests. But he never gets any credit. Poor Tricky Dick.

The part of your book I found most illuminating was how the company making Suboxone basically hired the same salespeople that Purdue Pharma used to hawk OxyContin.

They used the exact same people.

As Purdue was coming under legal fire and the threat of heavy lawsuits, it started laying off most of its sales force and its marketing department. Those people all got scooped up by the small pharmaceutical subsidiary of Reckitt Benckiser, a European conglomerate that mostly produced home goods like Lysol cleaner and Woolite.

They brought Suboxone to market in 2003, and it was kind of a commercial flop because they were trying to promote it for the treatment of heroin addiction.

But in 2005, they got a new president from England, and he started targeting the rising prescription opioid epidemic. So they go back to the same doctors who were prescribing OxyContin, and now they start selling them Suboxone.

David Courtright, the great drug historian, came up with this phrase, “Start the fire, sell the hose.” So Purdue and OxyContin started the fire, and then those same salespeople moved over to Reckitt Benckiser and they began selling the hose. It was a self-contained system.

And in order to protect their sales, they basically lied about Suboxone’s safety for children, right?

Yeah, exactly. Now, buprenorphine is a really important medication and a lot of people have benefited from it, and I’m sure even more people could benefit from it if we made it more accessible. But one of the reasons it’s not easily accessible is because the Suboxone distribution system started to look eerily similar to the pill mills that were distributing OxyContin.

Reckitt Benckiser didn’t mind this because they were making, like, a billion dollars a year. Suboxone by 2012 was outselling Adderall and EpiPens and Viagra.

But they were using flawed data. And instead of promoting Suboxone tablets they were promoting a new version, sublingual film strips, because they were threatened by generic competition and wanted to re-up their patent on these new film strips.

So they started playing the exact same games that Purdue was playing with OxyContin about a decade prior. They started promoting the drug as less prone to misuse, as safer, especially if you have children, because film strips were individually wrapped, whereas a bottle full of tablets could look like candy.

But data actually showed that Suboxone film strips were more dangerous for children. So they were product hopping. They were criminally mismarketing the drug.

When Purdue Pharma was prosecuted in 2007, they kind of got off with a slap on the wrist. No one went to jail. But when the Department of Justice took on Reckitt Benckiser and its spin off company Indivior in 2020, that resulted in the largest opioid settlement in American history up to that point. They were charged about $2 billion in penalties, and the former president, who had hired all those laid-off Purdue staff people, spent six months in federal prison. It was a huge deal.

You were tipped off by a Suboxone saleswoman whistleblower named Gail Groves Scott. She was great. How did you track her down?

I believe someone put us in touch. She actually was the salesperson in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I grew up.

She was very brave to come forward.

She really was. She’s pretty incredible. A lot of people really opened up about their experiences in this book, which I found touching. The generation of people involved in developing the field of medication-assisted treatment are mostly still alive, but we’re losing them rapidly. [Nixon’s first drug czar] Jerome Jaffe is 92, turning 93.

It was very kind of you to introduce us so I could interview him for Antagonist. I know he gave you boxes of his archival materials to go through. What was the kookiest thing he did during your time together, and what was the most endearing?

He was very hard on me in the beginning. We first connected in 2018, when I wasn’t really sure what this project was yet. I talked to him on the phone quite a lot, and after our early conversations, I’d hang up the phone and cry because he was so mean to me.

Aww. What was he mean to you about?

He’s very historically rigorous. He’s like, “You’re wrong about this.” He can be very abrasive.

But as I started putting the pieces together and went through all of his papers, his attitude towards me softened. And I think he saw me as someone who really was trying to tell his story as accurately as I could, because for decades he had been smeared for his work in establishing methadone clinics as someone who was tied to, like, narco genocide.

On that subject, your book explores how early methadone clinics were located primarily in Black communities, and how there was a lot of pushback — death threats, even. Do you think it was fair to claim that the government was using methadone to control minorities and suppress crime, rather than to help addicted users?

These were very legitimate concerns in the 1970s. This was following the Tuskegee syphilis study, and was towards the end of forced sterilization of Black women on welfare. There were reasons for these communities to be distrustful.

But today they call methadone the gold standard of treatment, and we know it does work. So that’s the contradiction of methadone’s history.

The methadone clinic system is a really weird system that nobody likes. Right? The neighborhoods don’t like it, the patients don’t like it, the politicians don’t like it. And somehow this exact same system is still operating fifty years later.

Why do you think methadone clinics generally don’t dispense naltrexone? In Antagonist I speculate it’s because naltrexone is not profitable for these clinics.

Right. Methadone clinics are commercial industries rather than actual public health clinics. An actual public health clinic wouldn’t care if naltrexone or Vivitrol wasn’t profitable for them, because the point wouldn’t be profitability.

This is completely tied to the 1981 divestment of methadone by the Reagan administration, which turned the clinics into private companies. It’s like, you can’t ask a cat to be a dog.

I think naltrexone has been really screwed over by methadone clinics. And most private physicians don’t want to treat addiction, so they’re not going to be a prime source for Vivitrol prescriptions either. There’s no one who has really taken the reins and run with it.

Do you think the methadone clinic system should be abolished, in favor of allowing all doctors to prescribe methadone?

It’s worth noting that Suboxone, which for 23 years has made opioid agonist treatment [widely] available, has not been the savior of the opioid epidemic either.

First, few doctors were trained in addiction medicine. Second, few doctors were interested in private addiction treatment. Opioid users were considered “problematic” patients, and disruptive to a general practice.

The only doctors interested in prescribing Suboxone were those with an “entrepreneurial mindset.” In Appalachia, commercial Suboxone clinics mirrored the same pill mills that had brought OxyContin there a decade prior.

So rather than abolishing methadone clinics, I’d like to complement them. What we need is what Jaffe envisioned back in 1971: a nationwide system of multi-modal clinics that offer all forms of addiction treatment (including all three medications), among a suite of other social, behavioral, and public health services. In my ideal world, methadone clinics and private prescribers would complement this system.

My last question: Did you have fun traveling to Switzerland for “research”?

I had a great time. It was my first time there and it was pretty. I saw a lot of clinics and I talked to a lot of people. It was very eye opening.

There’s been a transformation there since the 1980s, when Zurich’s “Needle Park” was globally infamous for its high rates of heroin use and HIV. Now, it’s this quiet, beautiful, calm place.

The Swiss have a real love for public order, and that’s very much on display with their treatment programs. I think they’re a model for what can be achieved when you actually emphasize elements of public health in your response to illicit drug use.

If you give people an option for treatment and make it accessible and available and attractive, they will probably take it, because addiction is actually not a very comfortable life. And most people who are in the throes of chaotic addiction are not very happy about it.

So, giving them an option and an alternative — as I saw in Switzerland and in some really great programs in the U.S., including in St. Louis — is not an impossible dream. It really can be implemented on the ground.

Since the pandemic I’ve grown obsessed with running, training throughout the year, spending absurd amounts on gels and supershoes, and mastering jargon like “fartlek,” “negative splits,” and “repetition pace.” (The latter is particularly nonsensical, meaning, essentially, “really fast.”)

I’ve mainly focused on longer distances, and have run marathons including Chicago, Boston, and L.A. (I feel bad for this guy.) But I enjoy many lengths, and one of my favorite events is coming up this weekend, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Run in downtown St. Louis.

This race is 48 years old, and it’s a big green party. Held in conjunction with our St. Patrick’s Day parade, it kicks off near Busch stadium, and features Irish politicians on the P.A. offering encouragement in their thick brogue. The 5,000 attendees rock shamrock and leprechaun attire. I get amped when they play the Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” as the gun fires.

Another part of the appeal is the race’s distance, 5 miles. That’s fairly unique. There aren’t many 5 mile races around, but it’s an enjoyable distance, short enough so you can still go fast, but long enough so it’s not an all-out sprint.

Or at least, the St. Patrick’s Day race was 5 miles previously. All of a sudden this year organizers switched it to a 5K. They didn’t announce this change, and in fact their website practically buries the information.

This has caused outrage! (Sort of.) Usually my running group, pictured above last year, sends dozens of participants. But this year when I asked who was going, I received only a single reply. Some of us discussed a boycott, and we were only half kidding.

What’s the big deal? Well, 5Ks suck! It’s a terrible distance, requiring an intensity similar to a one mile race, but three times as long. It’s basically 15-30+ minutes of pure suffering, depending on your speed.

Another part of the problem is the race distance’s ubiquity. Despite the fact that Americans can’t stand the metric system, the 5K has somehow taken over as our de facto fun run, a social event for plodders to burn off a few calories and then quickly gain them back with post-run doughnuts and beer.

But serious runners race the 5K too; they just call it the 5000. And because there are so many of these events, most racers have done many of them over the years, making it very difficult to set a personal record. And since trying to PR is a big part of racing’s appeal, this distance quickly loses its luster.

I’m not the fastest guy around, but I loved the old St. Patrick’s Day Parade Run because it was the only 5 mile race I ran during the year. Therefore, I could often PR. Now, it’s just another boring-ass 5K — one that costs $50 if you don’t sign up early.

It’s not like we’re hurting for 5Ks around here. By my count there are no less then ten 5K runs in the St. Louis area this weekend. Absolutely absurd.

And so, because I have nothing better to do with my time, I decided to use my investigative reporting skills to get to the bottom of this change. Here’s the race’s registration director Billy Tomber’s response to my query:

For the first time in 2026, our downtown event is a 5K Run…The updated course takes advantage of the safety barricades and personnel already on site for the Parade. This ensures a safer route for our runners and volunteers alike….You are welcome to run farther after you finish the 5K as desired….Agreed the 5-mile was unique and fun, but that extra 38% was more than half of the costs as the old western end was completely without bike-racking and relied entirely on increasingly thinning manpower. If we can keep 62.5% of the distance and still have the downtown, Arch-view, Market Street portion – I’ll take it.

Thanks for giving me permission to continue running after the race is completed, bro!

But is this the full story? An off-the-record source tells me that declining attendance in recent years is one of the reasons for the decision. I suspect they’re trying to appeal more to the fair-weather racing crowd.

Bah! My running group can hope that their non-participation will move the needle, but I suspect it won’t. Most likely the distance change will inspire more participants than ever, and for the next 48 years the race will stay at 5000 deplorable meters.

The truth is, I am not much helping matters. That’s because, after much internal debate, I decided to sign up after all.

So sue me! I couldn’t help myself, it’s a really fun event. Sure, I’ll be absolutely miserable, running the hilly course at an uncomfortable pace, but hey, I cannot resist a raucous St. Paddy’s Day party with a Dropkick Murphys soundtrack.

So if you see me at the finish line, near collapse, barely able to breathe, just know that I brought this upon myself, that this is my idea of a good time and that, more than likely, I do not need an ambulance.

So many things to worry about. Politics. Climate. The future. But what I worry about most are poor people. People who have pressing needs right now, who are addicted to drugs or don’t have shelter or a job or hope.

How to help these people? Many nonprofit organizations in this realm have valiant missions, but which can be trusted? The other day at the grocery store I consented to “round up” for Urban League, to whom I’ve donated more substantial amounts in the past.

I have followed the organization for years and even once interviewed the CEO of the local chapter for a story. But I never looked into how efficiently they spend their money.

So let’s look.

Not bad, right? “Top rated.” Seemingly low overhead. A- is a pretty good grade. Higher than my GPA!

But the fine print, specifically their “Stated Mission” gives me pause. Securing economic self-reliance, parity, power, and civil rights for African-Americans sounds great, but what does this entail in practice?

Who is receiving money towards “power,” for example?

I see they partnered with former U.S. Rep Cori Bush in 2024 to secure federal funding for the renovation of their main facility in North St. Louis, called Urban League Plaza. I also see that, while the organization doesn’t donate directly to political candidates, its members have given money to Cori Bush and other Democrats.

I didn’t vote for Bush in 2024, I voted for her Democratic rival, Wesley Bell, who unseated her in the primary and then won the general election. But no matter; I’m more concerned with what Urban League is doing on the ground.

Turns out they’re building an African American history and arts museum in the plaza, but its status is unclear. (I just called over there and the receptionist said, “It won’t be open this year.”)

One of the organization’s other big facilities, however, has been open for almost a decade. The Ferguson Community Empowerment Center was built on the site of the former QuikTrip that was burned to the ground in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown.

I went there a few years back with Jovan Cleveland, the brother of Jorell, my mentee from the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program whose life and death I chronicled in Little Brother.

It’s a beautiful facility, heavily air-conditioned. We went to enroll Jovan into a job placement program, and everyone working there was very nice.

They had a whole room of suits, ties, and belts that had been donated, so applicants could look their best. They let Jovan try some on. They took his information, told him to remove references to drugs and guns from his Facebook page, and urged him to return in a couple of weeks for a jobs-skills class.

And then that was that. Jovan never followed up with them and, as far as I know, they never followed up with him.

Listen, I’m not trying to discredit this organization. I know they do lots to help the community. But, from the standpoint of efficiency, I’d like to know where my donation money is going.

According to Urban League St. Louis’ 2022 financial statement (the most recent one available on their website), their biggest expenses that year were salaries ($11.6 million) and “assistance to individuals” ($10.7 million).

There were also “professional fees” ($3.5 million), “occupancy” ($3.2 million), “supplies” ($2.9 million), and “telephone” ($640,000).

Considering that their total support and revenue for the year was $44.6 million, they do not seem incredibly efficient in their charity.

Again, I am certain all of these expenses were completely legitimate, completely normal operating costs for a nonprofit that is doing good work.

But that’s a ton of money on admin stuff, especially for tiny St. Louis.

The national organization, meanwhile, has a brand new $242 million facility in Harlem, a “414,000-square-foot hub that blends housing, history, and hope.”

That sounds totally grand. And I’m glad the people in the photo above have jobs helping people.

But I don’t want to pay their salaries. I don’t want my money to go to c-suite executives and politicians and contractors and administrators. I want to help poor people directly.

And that’s where it gets tricky…

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Antagonist update

The premiere screening in St. Louis last month was a blast! Thanks to everyone who came out. You can see Antagonist by making a small donation to our Patreon. Doing so will also help us bring the film to a wider audience.

Ok, on with the post!

The overdose death rate finally began falling in the second half of 2023. After so many years of bad news, suddenly we saw improvements in pretty much every state.

But why? No one knew. Could it be increased distribution of Narcan? Greater border enforcement? As I wrote:

This question is difficult because in recent years we’ve been throwing shit against the wall. We’ve tried everything from harm reduction to stiffer drug penalties, from de-criminalizing drugs to re-criminalizing drugs.

I believed that fentanyl had likely already picked off the majority of the country’s most vulnerable drug users — people living on the margins — and that therefore the crisis was burning itself out.

But that’s not the conclusion of a just-published study in Science, which is something of a bombshell in the drug policy community.

Co-authored by a murderer’s row of academics and policy wonks (Kasey Vangelov, Keith Humphreys, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Harold Pollack, Bryce Pardo, and Peter Reuter), it posits that the decline in deaths likely came about due to “supply shock,” ie because fentanyl mixtures became less potent. (I’ve linked to good summary of the Science piece rather than the study itself, which is paywalled for an exorbitant price.)

The [DEA] data revealed a distinct pattern. The average purity of fentanyl powder seized by authorities rose throughout 2022 and peaked at roughly 25 percent in early 2023. Following that peak, purity levels plummeted. By the end of 2024, the average purity of seized powder had fallen to approximately 11 percent.

Because there was less fentanyl on the streets, fewer people died.

Interesting! Yes, correlation is not causation, but it’s uncanny how the fall in purity levels in fentanyl mixtures seized by the DEA (as well as drug seizures reported by the National Forensic Laboratory Information System) correlated to the plummeting drug death rate. The study authors even combed through Reddit pages to see when users reported fentanyl “droughts” and “shortages,” and those mentions correlated to the death drop too.

So then, what caused this supply shock? At the time, I assumed it had something to do with the Mexican cartels. For example, in 2023 the Sinaloa cartel banned fentanyl production and distribution in its region.

But, again, that’s not what the Science researchers found. They say China likely caused the supply shock.

To reach this conclusion they compared the death rate in the U.S. (where illicit fentanyl largely comes from the cartels) to the death rate in Canada, where illicit fentanyl is usually manufactured domestically, from chemicals sourced from China.

If the supply shock were caused by law enforcement actions at the US-Mexico border or conflicts between Mexican cartels, the Canadian market should have remained relatively stable. However, the data showed that Canada experienced a similar disruption. Opioid-related deaths in Canada began to decline in the third quarter of 2023.

Since Chinese chemical companies supply fentanyl precursors both to the cartels and to Canadian fentanyl manufacturers, then, the researchers found that “actions taken by the Chinese government are the most plausible explanation” for the supply shock.

Tooting my horn

Why has the Chinese government taken strong action against fentanyl?

I believe my efforts — combined with those of many others working to influence leadership in the U.S. and China on the issue — are responsible.

Maybe I’m wrong! But it’s fair to say I’ve beaten the drum about Chinese fentanyl more loudly, for longer, than anyone else.

At the time of Fentanyl, Inc.’s publication in 2019, almost all of the media’s attention was on Mexico’s role in the trade. Yet I focused on the China side. I exposed numerous companies selling fentanyl analogues and precursors, including the one selling more precursors than any other company in the world, called Yuancheng.

Upon the book’s publication Yuancheng’s CEO was indicted, with $5 million offered for his capture. He remains at large, but the company is now a shell of itself.

More importantly, Fentanyl Inc.’s revelations about the Chinese government — particularly how the CCP was subsidizing fentanyl exports — directly spurred the U.S. government to action.

I testified on Capitol Hill. Trump tweeted about my findings. I went on nearly every prominent media platform — Fresh Air, Joe Rogan, Fox News, The New York Times — and advised government agencies from ONDCP to Congress to State. I gave some fifty talks. In 2024, I submitted testimony for another hearing.

In the meantime, both Trump and Biden met with Chinese President Xi, demanding and receiving concessions on fentanyl precursor controls.

Now, China no longer supports companies making fentanyl products. Instead, it cracks down on them.

Is China trying to kill Americans?

In almost every interview, I’m asked if China is trying to kill Americans. No! The truth is more banal: they’re just trying to grow their economy.

China established its tax rebates for fentanyl exports around 2014, I believe, around the same time the fentanyl crisis began in the U.S.

I think China did this for the same reason it gives tax rebates for thousands of other chemicals — to spur its pharma and chemical industries.

But this rebate program for fentanyl analogues and precursors went awry because the government didn’t discriminate between companies selling these chemicals for medical use, and companies selling them for illicit use.

Because of these rebates, and because of the grants and other incentives China gave to these rogue companies, the illicit fentanyl trade blossomed.

It’s not that no one other countries make fentanyl ingredients. Plenty do. It’s just that no one else has the vast infrastructure to make them so cheaply.

And cost matters. When prices rise, traffickers adulterate the drugs more, to maintain profits. But that’s good! Because, in general, the more adulterated your fentanyl is, the less deadly it is.

Only after the U.S. made a big deal about fentanyl precursors — I give credit to both Trump and Biden — did China change these incentive programs, and start going after precursor companies.

According to the report in Science, this likely saved thousands of lives.

Still, the authors caution that the supply shock may not last, that the free flow of cheap precursor chemicals may resume, perhaps from India.

This would be trouble, because India has fewer controls than China. And their chemical production infrastructure is nearly as robust.

Yet, they’re barely on our diplomatic radar right now.

So enough self congratulating. There are still way too many overdose deaths. For myself and others, its time to get back to work.

People are asking my opinion on the Diddy docuseries, Sean Combs: The Reckoning. I love it! It’s extremely well done. Kudos to director Alexandria Stapleton and her production team, including king troll 50 Cent (more about him below).

The Reckoning provides the Bad Boy co-founder’s deserved comeuppance, not just for his decades-long abuse and exploitation of the mothers of his children, his girlfriends, his artists, and his business partners, but also for his alleged role in the Tupac murder.

I love that a gritty, well-reported piece of hip-hop journalism is the most popular show on television right now. Here’s what I like about the series:

It canonizes the correct theory of Tupac’s death

Who killed Tupac? Can you answer this question? Until recently, almost nobody could, including Tupac superfans.

Muddying the waters were a pair of competing theories, one that was nonsense and one that was correct.

The first was popularized by Randall Sullivan’s 2003 book LAbyrinth, based on former LAPD detective Russell Poole’s assertion that corrupt cops were involved in both Tupac and Biggie’s murders, as well as covering them up.

This convoluted theory never held up to scrutiny, but it’s had remarkable staying power, thanks in part to a Johnny Depp movie about this nonsense called City Of Lies, which came out in 2021.

The Depp movie bombed, and hopefully the Poole theory died with it. Much more credible was the investigation by another former LAPD detective, Greg Kading, who is interviewed in Sean Combs: The Reckoning. Kading’s sources say Diddy wanted Tupac and Suge Knight dead, and even offered cash bounties for the murders (though Diddy never paid up).

Yes, Kading’s main source had incentives to cooperate, and Diddy has never been prosecuted for the death. And, truth be told, I’m not 100 percent certain you can draw a straight line from Diddy to Tupac’s demise. More likely is that the killing was done in the heat of the moment, after Tupac and his group stomped out a Compton Crip named Orlando Anderson at the MGM casino in Las Vegas. Then Anderson and a group of other Crips retaliated by pulling up alongside Suge’s BMW and shooting it up, grazing Suge and killing Tupac.

I am certain, however, thanks to Kading’s police work, that Diddy wanted Tupac dead, so much so that he got into conversation with people who could make it happen, and the docuseries explores an interesting explanation for why. Sure, Diddy feared Death Row Records was coming for him, but that’s not the only reason. According to the series, it’s also likely because Diddy was insanely jealous of Tupac.

Remember, early in Biggie’s career, before he was successful, Tupac was one of Biggie’s greatest champions. The two of them chummed it up on both coasts, perhaps causing Diddy to fear he was losing control of his artist. Further emphasizing this point is something the docuseries overlooked; as I reported in Original Gangstas, Biggie originally wanted Tupac to be his manager. Tupac declined, but it’s clear that Diddy had real reason to doubt Big’s loyalty.

50 Cent gets his flowers

It cracks me up that…

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My documentary about the controversial treatment medicine naltrexone is finally making its debut. Antagonist: How a Wonder Drug Got Sidelined premieres this Saturday, December 13, at the St. Louis County Public Library. Tickets are free, but you’re asked to register here. It will be a fun event, with food, drinks, and even a red carpet. Here’s a nice preview from St. Louis Magazine.

If you don’t live in St. Louis, and are unwilling to drive across the country, you have another option, via our Patreon, where for a small contribution you can see the film.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible! We filmed all over the country, visiting open air drug markets in St. Louis and San Francisco, talking to academics at Stanford, Columbia, Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, and Smith, interviewing doctors, journalists, and harm reduction activists in Davis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and speaking with NIDA’s director Nora Volkow outside of Washington DC.

We visited homeless shelters and recovery centers, talked with people with wildly divergent points of view, and tried to make sense of why drug and alcohol treatment in this country is failing so badly.

The soundtrack features music from Moby, Wayne Coyne, and an original theme song from St. Louis rapper 2MP Kosta.

The film features 1960s archival footage from an old methadone clinic in Ohio, and from a federal prison in Kentucky called the Narcotic Farm, where addicted heroin users, including famed New York City jazz musicians like Chet Baker and Sonny Rollins, came to receive “the cure.”

Below are some more images from the film, which features a truly interesting cast of characters!

During the 2016-2017 school year, three Truman State University students killed themselves.

Their names were Alex Mullins, Jake Hughes, and Josh Thomas. They were all members of the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity, and are pictured above.

Their ties to another member of their fraternity, Brandon Grossheim, is the subject of my new podcast with Ryan Krull, called The Peacemaker.

Truman State University is located in Kirksville, a rural town in northern Missouri. The major employers are the Kraft-Heinz plant, which makes cold cuts, and Truman State.

It’s an academically rigorous school, known for heavy course loads, high rates of depression, and binge drinking.

The Greek system is robust. The fraternity where the suicides happened, AKL, is known for heavy drug use. One former Truman State student told me, “AKLs were the heaviest of the drug-using fraternities and they were doing drugs that weren’t just weed. A lot of psychedelics, but also lab-created ‘research chemicals.’”

The three victims all killed themselves the same way, by hanging themselves at the fraternity.

Brandon Grossheim had close ties to all of them, and is now being sued by some of the parents for allegedly encouraging their sons’ deaths.

Following Jake’s suicide, Brandon was kicked out of Alpha Kappa Lambda. He soon dropped out of Truman State. He moved into an off-campus apartment complex called the Journal Building.

Brandon moved in across the hall from a student from another nearby college, named Alex Vogt. (Not to be confused with the first victim, Alex Mullins.)

Brandon and Alex Vogt were tight; they worked together at a restaurant across the street owned by Alex’s father, called the Wooden Nickel.

The Wooden Nickel was where employees like Alex and Brandon worked, drank, and did drugs, sometimes simultaneously.

After hours they went back home across the street to the Journal Building, and the party continued. “A lot of weed,” said a friend of Alex’s named Terry Yardley. “A lot of liquor and every now and then, cocaine, but never anything more hardcore than that.”

Not long after Brandon moved into the building, Alex killed himself as well.

After Alex Vogt died, another Journal Building resident, named Cody Robin, moved into his old room.

Cody had been dating a woman who’d recently moved to Kirksville, named Glenna Haught.

Glenna and Cody soon broke up, and she began dating Terry Yardley, a mechanic and biker.

But Glenna and Terry’s relationship hit a snag too. Told by doctors she would die if continued drinking recklessly, she fell off the wagon. She and Terry argued; she left their home and went to Cody’s apartment in the Journal Building.

Cody wasn’t there at the time, but she let herself in, and then proceeded to more or less drink herself to death. The last person to see her before she died was Brandon Grossheim.

He lived across the hall. He claimed he’d heard a large “thump,” like she’d fallen out of the lofted bed, pictured above. He came over to investigate. And then, after talking to her — she said she was fine, he later told police — he left.

Glenna’s body was discovered by Cody when he got home. She was nearly naked, lying on the floor. Police questioned Brandon, who had scratches all over his arms. He said he got them from his cats.

He was never charged criminally. Terry Yardley remains furious with him, however. “That guy better hope I never run into him ever again, because I have a lot of questions that need to be answered, but I don’t know if I’ll let him get to the point to talk.”

New episodes of The Peacemaker drop every Tuesday. Find it anywhere you get podcasts. In the upcoming series finale, we review all of the evidence and decide if we think Brandon Grossheim was responsible for these deaths.

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Editor’s note: Episode three of The Peacemaker is out now. We talk with women who dated Brandon Grossheim, the former Truman State student accused of encouraging his fraternity brothers to commit suicide. Grossheim’s girlfriends were depressed; one accused him of “grooming” her for suicide herself. You can read more about the podcast in the Post-Dispatch.

Little known fact: I have a rap album.

Spoiler alert: I can’t rap. It’s called I Am the Light Of the World, and was recorded in 2007 under my nom de hip-hop, MC 401(k). Is it bad? Yes. But I enlisted some pretty good producers, rappers, and singers for songs like “I Love the Red States,” “Best Reporter At the Post-Dispatch Under 35,” and “Ian Has An Internet Girlfriend,” the latter of which is an underground classic. And by underground classic I mean my kids like it.

It’s available on CD. And by available, I mean there are a few in a drawer in my office.

Anyway, my hip-hop career went on a long hiatus, but has now come blazing back to life, as I just co-produced an absolute banger called “The Shot,” by St. Louis rap hero 2MP Kosta, which you can hear below.

Don’t worry. I don’t rap on it at all.

The song appears on the soundtrack to my documentary Antagonist. Like the film, it focuses on the life-saving addiction drug Vivitrol, which remains underused due to junk science and suppression by big-money interests.

This might not sound like typical rap song material, but trust me that the track and video hit hard.

It was filmed last month on the site of a former cement plant in north St. Louis County.

The plant was being turned into a 50 acre, avant-garde amusement park called Cementland when its creator Bob Cassilly died suddenly in 2011.

Cassilly, the mad genius behind St. Louis’ iconic City Museum, was working at Cementland when his tractor flipped and tumbled down a hill, killing him instantly.

Or, at least, that’s what was originally believed.

Later, a physician reviewed the evidence and determined Cassilly was murdered, that he was beaten to death, and that the tractor scene was staged.

A potential culprit or motive remains unknown.

In the years since its creator’s death, Cementland has slowly gone back to nature, growing more visually stunning each year. It’s a favorite of urban explorers, but not open to the public and difficult to access because it’s surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

On the day of filming, however, we were delighted to find the front gates open. We drove our cars in, parked, and started shooting, only to realize an hour or so later that we’d been locked in.

No one knew we were there; it turns out work was being done on the site, and the workers had locked up behind themselves when they left.

I started freaking out. We had 12 people with us, including the rapper, 2MP Kosta, the film crew, and, as extras, former users from RecoVet, the veteran-focused recovery houses in St. Louis, whom you can see in the video.

One of them, Brett Rudloff, is also featured in Antagonist.

Would we be arrested, our cars impounded? Frantically I pushed through a hole in the fence to get out of the site and then, unsure what to do, asked some construction workers across the street if they knew Cementland’s current owner.

They surely thought I was nuts. I had blood on my arm from some barbed wire. But they agreed to contact the owner. Boy, was he irritated.

We were certainly not the first people to access Cementland, but we were still trespassing. He agreed to open up and let our cars out, on the condition that we cease filming. If not, he said, he would call the police.

I agreed, but it was a bait and switch. After driving our cars out and laying low for a little while, we squeezed back in through the hole in the fence and resumed filming! The police never came.

Like I said, I couldn’t be more happy with the video. Visually, it's stunning.

And it was a great pleasure working with 2MP Kosta, whose real name is Kosta Longmire. He’s a terrific rapper from the Ville neighborhood whom I’ve been writing about for years. “2MP” stands for “Too Much Pain.”

The beat was created by St. Louis producer K.E. On The Track and engineered by Dan Rapture.

The video was shot and edited by Jayp Mayorga, of Lucid Visions, who knocked it out of the park. Jayp is pronounced “J.P.”

He collaborated with Tristan Shannon, who shot much of Antagonist. The dream team!

So why did we do all of this? The company that makes Vivitrol certainly didn’t pay us anything.

Most of Antagonist’s soundtrack comes from mobygratis.com, the site set up by Moby for low-budget and student filmmakers. There are tons of great songs to choose from, and we snagged one that’s a collaboration between Moby and Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips.

But I wanted something hard-edged for the film’s closing credits. Considering Kosta has seen his neighborhood decimated by addiction, it was a perfect fit.

As for the video, we did it for the art!

And for the chance to hang out at Cementland. It might sound strange, but it’s kind of my happy place, the best ruin porn in town. There’s history everywhere you look. It’s the only spot I know where you can be inside and outside at the same time.

Combine that with two of my other favorite things — Midwestern hip-hop and shining a spotlight on addiction recovery — and you’ve got my idea of a good time. I hope you enjoy the video.

Editor’s note: The new episode of my podcast The Peacemaker is out now!

Katie Bain is the L.A.-based Senior Music Correspondent at Billboard, where she focuses on electronic music and sustainability. Her new book Desert Dreams: The Music, Style, and Allure Of Coachella is a wonderful history of the festival, from its roots on the punk and dance scenes (one influential early figure was a major drug trafficker) to its current ubiquity as a cultural tastemaker.

The coffee-table style book features gorgeous photography and substantively covers the event’s highlights and lowlights, from Beychella to the Tupac hologram to Andre 3000 screwing up the Outkast reunion show. It documents the fashion as well, from Paris Hilton’s crown headbands to bro t-shirts explicitly promoting rape culture.

I edited L.A. Weekly’s Coachella coverage from 2012-2014, and Katie was one of my writers. She’s the best! I commissioned her to write stories like “Here’s How People Are Trying to Sneak Drugs Into Coachella,” and she always crushed. She’s a great writer with great music taste, and I miss her. Below we talk about trends at the festival over the years, from the music to the drugs.

Hanging out with you at Coachella was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.

Oh my God, thank you, because I feel the same way. I was doing an interview two weeks ago, and she was like, ‘What were your favorite Coachella moments?’ And I’m sure she thought I was going to say something musical. And I was like, ‘Hanging out with the LA Weekly crew in 2013 and ‘14. We just had the best fucking time.’ We had a perfect crew.

Awww. So, why do you think Coachella has captured the public’s imagination? So many festivals come and go.

I think because it reliably brings the biggest artists. Obviously, it’s close to Los Angeles, so it also pulls a lot of famous people out there. People look to it as a barometer for what the trends are, music and fashion-wise. And I think Coachella has so brilliantly marketed itself through the livestream. It’s created a seismic event in culture, because people can access it even if they haven’t been there.

When you first went in 2008, what about it intrigued you?

I just went to see Prince, the headliner. I would say the fascination started later, probably around the time when you and I met, around 2011, when I was getting into the writing world. It just kind of clicked for me what a big deal it was. I remember feeling the buzz around it. It was like a holiday.

I like that description. How do you think Coachella affected the rise of EDM culture in the U.S.?

I think its influence cannot be overstated, in terms of helping legitimize dance music culture here in a massive way. In Southern California in the late ‘90s most of the rave world was underground, and it was illegal. But there was so much great music happening. People like Pasquale Rotella, Jason Bentley, and Paul Tollett were young at that time, but they really helped bring the scene to the fore.

Do you know about this festival, Organic 94? That was the first festival where it was like, there’s a business here. Coachella just built upon that model. Paul was involved with Organic and he worked with Pasquale and the Insomniac Crew. I think there was an Insomniac tent at the first Coachella.

The first lineups were like Roni Size and the Chemical Brothers and The Orb. Very electronic heavy and kind of alt-electronic heavy. Now, every year I have the same thought that electronic music is really the backbone of Coachella. Two stages now are entirely dedicated to the genre: Yuma and Quasar. Sahara is not entirely EDM these days, but it was the epicenter of dance music at Coachella for so long.

All right, let’s talk drugs. How do you think Coachella attendees’ drug consumption habits have changed over the years? Drugs always seemed like such a big part of the experience. Not just getting wasted, but the cultural influence. I learned about certain drugs at Coachella for the first time.

Yeah. In the days when you and I were going together, it was like, molly, molly, molly, molly, molly, molly, molly, molly, molly, ecstasy, molly, molly. MDMA was the drug of choice. That was kind of the EDM starter package essential item. Now, people seem to be doing a lot more ketamine, not just at Coachella but in dance culture at large.

Oh, wow. Ketamine was not on the radar at all back then.

It has supplanted MDMA. And that’s super interesting, I think from a cultural perspective, because times have changed. It’s a less optimistic era now.

Are there noticeably fewer people acting like everyone is their best friend?

I can’t say I’ve seen that with my naked eye, but anecdotally, talking with DJs who play around the world, at stadiums, they say, ‘I don’t like playing for ketamine crowds.’

Continue for a picture of Ben and Katie in 2014 wearing controversial shirts

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Truman State University is a well-regarded college in northern Missouri, surrounded by farmland, near the Iowa border.

It is known for its heavy workload and high rates of student depression, but no one was prepared for the chaos and tragedy that unfolded there during the 2016 school year.

That year three members of the same fraternity, called Alpha Kappa Lambda, killed themselves at the fraternity house. They all did it in the same manner — hanging — and were all close friends with another member of the frat, named Brandon Grossheim.

Grossheim, a psychology major from Alton, Illinois, was known for going out of his way to befriend Truman students having emotional problems. In fact, according to the lawsuit against him, he called himself “The Peacemaker,” for his supposed ability to counsel troubled young people.

But he had no formal training, and a startling number of his friends killed themselves. At the Alpha Kappa Lambda house, Grossheim discovered the bodies of the first two victims, Alex Mullins and Jake Hughes, who died only three weeks apart.

When another victim named Josh Thomas was found near the end of the school year, a piece of paper next to his body had Grossheim’s email addresses written on it.

Before his death, Thomas had called Grossheim “the person he trusted more than anybody else.”

Grossheim was kicked out of Alpha Kappa Lambda. He dropped out of school and moved into an off-campus apartment called the Journal Building.

But that was not the end of the story. Soon after he moved into the Journal Building there was even more tragedy.

In fact, wherever Grossheim went, suicide seemed to follow.

The suicide cluster and Brandon Grossheim are the subject of my new podcast, The Peacemaker, now available on iHeartMedia. I’m the host and co-producer, along with my friend Ryan Krull, an amazing reporter for St. Louis Magazine. We recorded it at CoolFire Studios here in town.

You can find it wherever you get podcasts, or at the links below.

We spent three years reporting this story, and have broken it wide open. It’s incredible how this seemingly non-threatening kid from Alton — described by some as “empathetic” — managed to find himself caught up in so many suicides.

Each time police came to talk to Grossheim about another death, it was like an episode of Groundhog Day. Below, a cop interviews him at the pizza parlor where he worked.

Even stranger is that many don’t blame Grossheim at all. In fact, maybe 50 percent of people we interviewed — former students who knew Grossheim or knew the victims — say that he genuinely cared about these kids. They blame other factors for the suicides, and note that Grossheim was never charged criminally.

That is true, but he is not out of the woods. The parents of some of the victims believe he was directly responsible for their sons’ deaths, and remain extremely angry. They have filed a civil case against Brandon, which will be heard soon in federal court.

Ahead of the trial, I hope you’ll check out The Peacemaker. The first of eight episodes came out today, and new ones drop every Tuesday. Let me know what you think!

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By now you may have seen the viral video of a man threatening to Narcan a drug user in San Francisco.

This video might seem confusing at first, because we usually hear about Narcan’s life-saving effects, how it brings people who are ODing back to life.

But Narcan can be a total nightmare for an opioid user who’s not ODing. The drug, also known as naloxone, works by binding so tightly to opioid receptors that it knocks off anything else inhabiting the receptors — like fentanyl or heroin.

If you’re ODing, that’s great. But people who are simply high don’t want to be Narcanned, because it sends them into acute withdrawal. And that’s a horrible sensation.

“Using Narcan this way is not just mean spirited, it’s cruel,” Dr. Ayesha Appa of UCSF told the San Francisco Standard. “When you send someone from a resting state to a heart rate of over 120, and say somebody has preexisting medical problems…it can be life-threatening.”

Sometimes, even users on the brink of death become extremely agitated when they’re Narcanned — even trying to fight the person who administered the medicine — because before the Narcan they felt bliss, or at least calm. Now they feel awful.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the apparent trend of threatening street users with Narcan so they will go away.

As annoying as it can be to have an unhoused person loitering in front of your home or business, terrorizing them isn’t the answer.

But it’s not new. In fact, it has been going on for decades, often in an official capacity.

Starting in the 1950s a similar drug was widely used by police to suss out heroin users.

The drug was called nalorphine. It was a predecessor to naloxone. Like naloxone, nalorphine is an opioid antagonist, meaning it knocks other opioids off of the opioid receptors.

It was intended to reverse opioid overdoses, but that’s not how police were using it. Writes Nancy D. Campbell:

In Alameda County, where Oakland, California, is located, police used it as a tool of surveillance and social control, a pharmacological “tell” to detect who was dependent on narcotics.

Basically, police would give it to people suspected of using heroin, against their will. If they got sick and went into withdrawal, that was proof they had heroin in their systems!

The state of California even…

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Hardly any other journalist has been more critical of China than I, when it comes to its responsibility for the US fentanyl crisis.

In Fentanyl, Inc. I laid out the problem. Most of the fentanyl killing people here originates in China. I blamed the CCP for offering tax rebates, grants, and other incentives for Chinese companies to export fentanyl products.

My Capitol Hill testimony in 2019 inspired Trump to excoriate Chinese President Xi on Twitter, and I presented similar conclusions to the U.S. House Select Committee On the CCP last year.

I’ve been called xenophobic. I’ve been praised by xenophobes. I’ve been mocked in federal court by a Chinese kingpin, and told by the US State Department that I risk imprisonment if I visit China again, which is a shame because they have amazing eggplant.

All of this to say that I’ve hardly been soft on China. And I’m no knee-jerk Trump hater, either. I’ve given him credit for winning major concessions, particularly China’s blanket bans on fentanyl analogs, synthetic cannabinoids, and nitazines.

Sure, it’s difficult to prove that Trump’s hardball has been effective, and it’s unclear exactly how well China is now controlling the problem.

But they’re clearly trying. And the most important number — US fentanyl deaths — is dropping.

That’s why I believe it’s time for Trump to end the fentanyl tariffs.

Because, man, you got what you wanted.

Has China been a perfect ally in this fight? No. Could they be more stringent about controlling precursors? Certainly. And it wouldn’t even be very difficult. We already have…

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I’ve finally finished Antagonist, my feature-length documentary and directorial debut. It’s about a wonder drug called naltrexone, best known as the Vivitrol shot, which has helped countless people beat opioid and alcohol addictions, but has been trashed in the media and ignored by doctors.

Here’s our brand new official trailer:

Filmed over three years, Antagonist features interviews with experts like NIDA director Nora Volkow, former Drug Czars Jerome Jaffe and Robert DuPont, academics like Anna Lembke, and journalists including Maia Szalavitz.

It follows the trials and tribulations of a salty-yet-inspiring character named Percy Menzies (above) who runs a St. Louis recovery center and almost single-handedly battles to bring naltrexone into the mainstream.

Filmed largely on the drug-addled streets of St. Louis and San Francisco, the documentary also features archival footage from the Narcotic Farm, a federal prison in Kentucky where scientists experimented on prisoners, and where naltrexone was developed.*

*Methadone and buprenorphine were developed there as well!

For alcohol use disorder, naltrexone is particularly effective, and Antagonist talks with Dr. Joe Volpicelli, who helped secure its FDA approval for this purpose, as well as users whose lives were saved by naltrexone.

Antagonist also follows street drug users like Brett Rudloff, who lost everything to fentanyl and other drugs, for at time living alone in an industrial suburb with only a dumpster lid to protect him from the elements.

After he and his friend Jeff bought identical pills from a dealer, Jeff took his pill and died. Thankfully Brett didn’t take his, but the incident served as a wakeup call for Brett to start naltrexone, and he’s been sober ever since.

Despite naltrexone’s many success stories, the backlash against it has been fierce, led by attacks from groups including the methadone lobby and 12 step programs. In the media, naltrexone is almost never mentioned alongside the other FDA-approved medications for opioid addiction. When it is, it’s usually disparaged.

Antagonist is a work of investigative journalism that pulls no punches, a follow-up to my best-selling book Fentanyl, Inc. that seeks to understand why we are ignoring such an incredible tool to fight addiction, in the midst of the worst drug crisis in American history, and during a time when the alcohol death rate is even worse.

The answer, I conclude, is that naltrexone has been stymied by junk science, big-money interests, and poorly-informed journalism. There isn’t “one medicine to rule them all,” as advocates of other treatment drugs might have you believe.

Instead, we must use every tool in our kit to fight the addiction scourge.

Antagonist is not yet available to the public. But it can be licensed to organizations, schools, and private groups. If you would like to license it or sponsor a screening at your home or company, please email me at ben.westhoff@gmail.com

By Abraham Wang

At a time when American drug deaths have risen to unprecedented levels, South Korea stands in stark contrast.

Often called a “drug free” country, South Korea ranks almost last in the world when it comes to overdose deaths. (Only the Solomon Islands and Egypt have fewer per capita.)

And yet for years South Korea has been enmeshed in a major drugs controversy, called the Burning Sun (버닝썬) scandal, involving K-Pop stars and, now, the country’s president.

Drugs are truly scandalous in South Korea, in a way that’s hard to fathom here. Your average teenager not only hasn’t tried marijuana, she probably doesn’t know anyone who has.

Mostly, drugs float on the periphery, and recent decades have seen a relative influx of synthetic drugs like MDMA and yaba, a stimulant that includes meth. (Much comes from North Korea, dating back to when Kim Il-sung — the current president’s grandfather — reportedly ordered large-scale poppy cultivation, even mobilizing medical students.)

In 2019, the Burning Sun scandal erupted in South Korea, centered around the eponymous nightclub in Seoul’s ritzy Gangnam District. Once considered the hottest club in the country, Burning Sun was exposed as a place where women — including minors — were drugged with GHB, rendered unconscious, and raped by VIP customers.

How could this happen, especially in such a wealthy, high profile area? According to reports, high-ranking police officers covered up the crimes, concealed evidence, and suppressed whistleblower reports.

Numerous K-Pop stars were implicated in the scandal, including Seungri, formerly of Big Bang, and the owner of Burning Sun. He was convicted of “providing prostitutes to foreign businessmen” and other crimes, and served 18 months in prison.

Yet like Seungri, many of these bad actors received light sentences, and six years later, the story remains a national embarrassment, with many lingering questions and unresolved issues.

The scandal’s initial whistleblower Kim Sang-kyo — who physically fought with Burning Sun staff to save a drugged woman who was being dragged away — was convicted of sexual harassment, apparently in retaliation.

Meanwhile Goo Hara, a widely-popular singer from the girl group Kara, committed suicide in November, 2019. Working to expose the Burning Sun scandal, she had publicly accused high-level police officials of covering up crimes. Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend, Choi Jong-Bum, whom she alleged assaulted her and threatened to release a sex tape, was given only a suspended sentence.

And then, one month after Goo Hara’s death, someone broke into her home and stole a phone and documents from her safe.

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Earlier this month I took my family to a bluegrass festival outside of St. Louis. The event was held on a serene, 200-acre country space alongside the Meramec River, with a swimming hole, hiking trails, and camping in a big open field.

It was steamy, but the main stage viewing area was shielded by the canopy cover of a walnut grove. It was hard to imagine a nicer setting for the event’s banjo-meets-jam-band vibe, highlighted by 86-year-old headliner Del McCoury.

And yet the moment we arrived and I saw a local dispensary was the main sponsor, I knew we were in trouble. This was the first big music festival I’d attended since Missouri legalized weed two years ago, and it’s clear that the whole game done changed.

Now, the marijuana wasn’t being sold clandestinely by dreadlocked white guys in Rasta hats, it was being sold by legitimate cannabis businesses, operating out of food trucks. You could buy everything from flower to pre-rolls to edibles to THC-infused cocktails. Even the smoothies had CBD.

The average age of attendees was maybe 35; women in floppy hats and bikini tops and overly tattooed guys in sandals, with pipes in one hand and beers in the other. But families and kids were well represented too, even toddlers. “Please be respectful of our all ages community,” read the event’s website.

And yet, no one was. People smoked weed just about everywhere one could smoke weed: by the lake, in the campground, near the stages. As a result, entire areas were hotboxed, particularly the walnut grove. The clouds of smoke near the stage were so thick that my eleven-year-old said it was giving him a headache, and requested to go back to the tent.

This irritated me, in a way I couldn’t immediately articulate. It’s not like I’m not used to people using drugs at music festivals; I’ve practically made a career out of documenting their shenanigans. Besides, attendees were also drinking copiously — one bar had a sign that said, “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning” — and that didn’t bother me.

I guess it’s because, well, you can’t get children intoxicated on second-hand alcohol.

The marijuanification of America is well under way, and it’s just getting started. Before long we’ll have weed pool halls, weed arcades, weed sporting events, weed WeWorks, and 5Ks where you have to smoke a joint every mile.

Yet legalization states are already starting to stank. According to the New York Post, “NYC’s disgusting pot stench is keeping tourists away.” Minneapolis, according to friends there, stinks throughout, and I’ve also heard this about everywhere from…

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The most critical period of Tupac’s life followed his release from prison in October, 1995, when he signed with Suge Knight and moved to L.A.

This is when he recorded his biggest albums, and when his beef with Biggie Smalls reached a fever pitch. Tupac made a diss track saying he slept with Biggie’s wife, postured as a gang member, and became world famous. It ended, of course, with his murder in September, 1996.

At his side during this tumultuous year was a group called the Outlawz, friends from his New York days, who both collaborated with him musically and served as his personal protection.

Tupac gave them nicknames based on dictators — Kadafi, Hussein Fatal, Kastro, Napoleon. And then, when they needed reinforcements, they recruited a friend from New Jersey named Young Noble, aka Rufus Cooper III, who died by suicide earlier this month.

Cooper is best known for his appearance on Tupac’s posthumous song “Hail Mary,” and was also an artist and clothing designer. We spoke at great length ten years ago for Original Gangstas, and he provided incredible insight into this period of Tupac’s life.

It’s almost unimaginable what Cooper experienced at age 18, having been sprung overnight from poverty into a Hollywood lifestyle, but one that also overlapped with a deadly rap beef. Cooper was a joy to speak with, and I’m very sorry to hear about his death. RIP.

When Tupac got out of prison, did you move out to L.A. from New Jersey?

When he got out, I was going out to L.A. on the weekends, because I was still in school. Once he got comfortable with me, he embraced me 200 percent. He basically made me drop out of school. “Come stay with us, we gone get some money.” He didn’t even know I rapped at the time. I was just one of the young homies, a soldier.

The Outlawz were staying at a corporate apartment in Burbank or something, right up the street from where they be filming a lot of movies. A lot of celebrities were over there. We was mingling with a lot of models and industry girls back then. It was an awesome location for young boys to be at the time. It was unbelievable, man. It was a dream come true.

Hussein Fatal said that, when he wanted to bring you into the group, Tupac asked him: “What if we kill somebody? Is he going to tell?” Did Tupac ask you that?

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Back in 2019 I received an email from an anonymous source.

“I have been hacking and extorting Research Chemical companies for almost 3 years now,” he wrote.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Fuck these guys,” he went on. “I see myself as a modern age Omar Little.”

Was this guy serious? I wondered to myself. It wasn’t immediately obvious. His email address was clearly a burner.

“Research chemicals” is a euphemism for novel psychoactive substances (NPS), which are obscure recreational drugs — opioids or psychedelics or benzos or cannabinoids or whatever — with complicated names like 25i-nbome and AMB-FUBINACA.

Omar Little, of course, is the beloved Wire character who robbed drug dealers. This guy claimed to be doing that, except in cyberspace.

Now, this was shortly after the publication of Fentanyl, Inc., and I was getting all sorts of crazy emails. One guy saw me on Tucker Carlson and threatened to kill me.

But this guy seemed legit. He mentioned a bunch of research chemical companies by name, that he said he’d stolen from. I looked them up, and they were real. These companies were based out of China and the Netherlands. Some operated on the dark web, some on the clear web. They sold NPS and accepted cryptocurrency.

“Basically I hack them, take as many payments from the customers as I can, and finally extort both customers/companies.”

The more we chatted, the less he sounded like a kook. In fact, he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

“The security of most [research chemical company sites] is quite bad so it's almost no work compared to bug bounty hunting which I also do.”

I was intrigued by this guy’s email. Robbing drug dealers on the internet sounded incredibly badass. I wanted to tell his story — preserving his anonymity, of course — and he considered it.

Sure, he was no Robin Hood. He said he was a formerly-addicted user who originally started doing this to get out of debt.

And I’m not someone who thinks all dark web distributors are necessarily bad. Some have Amazon-style ratings systems, and sell much purer drugs than, say, street dealers.*

*Always test your drugs, kids.

But there was something romantic about his claim to prey on the worst of these web lords. He reserved special venom for companies that sold opioids, fentanyl precursors, and cathinones, the latter a synthetic stimulant derived from the khat plant. Perhaps he disliked cathinones because they were often mislabeled and sold as ecstasy? I’m not sure.

Anyway, over the following months we continued chatting over email, and…

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The last time I wrote about Trump, I predicted he would take credit for falling overdose death rates. He promptly did, and his press secretary got pissed when the Washington Post didn’t do the same.

That was three months and ten thousand news cycles ago. Elon. Public land sell-offs. Transgender softball pitcher. Iran.

But almost completely absent from the news has been the most significant foreign policy success of his new term. This achievement has been lost on nearly everyone — perhaps even on Trump himself, who somehow has not been bragging about it on Truth Social.

It involves a class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes. Though originally developed as pharmaceutical pain relievers, nitazenes have migrated almost entirely to the recreational realm, killing thousands of Americans in recent years.

Some nitazenes are even more potent than fentanyl, and though their misuse hasn’t yet reached epidemic levels, they have received tons of coverage, with headlines like:

“DEA reports alarming rise in nitazenes and overdose deaths”

“Even Worse Than Fentanyl”

“‘There has never been a more dangerous time to take drugs’”

Nitazenes, like most synthetic drugs of abuse, are primarily manufactured in Chinese labs. And though nitazenes are illegal in the U.S., in China most of them are entirely legal.

But that’s about to end because, on July 1, China will schedule the entire class of nitazenes. In what is known as a “blanket ban,” any type of nitazene that has been invented — and any that will be invented in the future — will be automatically controlled.

This is a big deal, because…

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