Book Reviews: Smoke and Ashes, by Amitav Gohosh; Fentanyl, Inc., by Ben Westhoff
one pan, one rave
Smoke And Ashes, by Amitav Gohosh. Strauss & Giroux, 2024.
Fentanyl, Inc. by Ben Westhoff (another Substacker). Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019.
I found Smoke And Ashes to be a waste of time. I expected much better (the book got rave reviews in the mainstream press.) Almost entirely derivative, with some glaring factual errors and only cursory familiarity with the topic of mind-altering substances. The impression I got from reading it is that the pharmacology, sociology, and history of opium use--and the use of mind-altering substances in general--was subordinated to a narrative focusing on the villainy of Western Colonialism. The sort of performative "left-signaling" that's currently fashionable in some elite academic circles. Retrospective history (already done by others, in much more detail) confused with Presentism--a Presentism, moreover, regarding present-day social milieux and cultural phenomena with which Gohosh shows minimal acquaintance, much less familiarity. A shallow, superficial reading, and a disappointment. Bottom of the stack. Read it after all the others.
Fortunately, Ben Westhoff's book Fentanyl, Inc. more than makes up for the deficiencies of Gohosh's book. It's tremendous: thoroughly researched, erudite, and featuring much first-person investigative work--including interviews with Chinese manufacturers of fentanyl, fentanyl analogues, and a host of other synthetic designer drugs! Westhoff's investigations took him around the world with up close and personal conversations and sociological notes taken at the leading edge of various
subcultures associated with the use of forbidden and taboo substances. The scope of the book goes far beyond the US drug scene, and examines a much wider array of designer drugs than the opioid analogs. Some of which the prohibition laws hadn't yet caught up with, at least as of the time of Westhoff's researches.
In his Chinese travels, Ben Westhoff also turned up evidence that the attitude of the Chinese government toward the enterprises manufacturing the clandestine synthetics was both knowing and indulgent. Some of the factories that turned out these products were massive enterprises that made a host of drugs and precursor substances across the board for sale worldwide, and the chemists at the forefront of inventing new analogs to skirt the law were well-educated, with backgrounds as holding legitimate posts in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. The impression I got was that at least some Chinese officials viewed the role of Chinese-made synthetic opioids and other mind altering drugs as justified payback for the coercive market policies of the 19th century Opium Wars era that largely profited UK and US overseers of the trade.
That said, considered in the overall context of 21st century trade competition with the West--particularly the US--the forbidden drugs trade is merely another front in a wider campaign of shall we say sharp practice by Chinese businesses with the backing of the CCP: counterfeit goods, intellectual property theft, cyber-espionage, low-balling, evasion of trade restrictions, etc. PRC policy in all of those realms is made on the basis of pragmatic concerns and pressure, not by any semblance of adherence to a spotless code of reciprocal ethics. In that regard, their efforts to curb their overseas export designer drug industry are entirely reactive, not proactive. The CCP attitude toward trade relations with other nations is cynically self-interested and pragmatic: they're basically saying that if the decadent individualist societies of other nations provide a profitable market for anything, they'll supply it. Whether it be illicit drugs or anything else, with the possible exception of panda bear boy parts and pedophile pornography. Until the governments of their trading partners put sufficient economic and diplomatic pressure on the CCP regime to lead to a crackdown, they're inclined to let their commodity businesses do as they please. The PRC is hustling for practical advantages, and in that regard their export of forbidden substances is less a revenge-driven vendetta than it is a bid for increasing their own leverage of economic and political clout in order to displace "Western" (US/UK and the other five original G7 nations, roughly) primacy in world affairs in a direction favoring alliances like BRIC, where the PRC is by far the most important member state.
The Chinese plainly view the US as lazy, complacent, and victims of a prosperity and power that their leaders have refused to wield responsibly via taking the measures necessary to surveill, coerce, and nurture the American masses in the direction of social accountability, enforced harmony, and a social morality enforced by punitive measures and carefully parceled rewards--the way the CCP does with their own people, the Chinese. My own view is very different: I think that we have a system that's over-legislated personal conduct in ways that are absolutist, irrational, and terribly inconsistent with the American tradition of civil liberties, and over the decades that contradiction has ruptured American society to the point where the official regime of punitive morality has been overwhelmed by its violators, to the detriment of the ability of government to enforce basic standards of public order. And it's weird to think that the whole mess began as a campaign to purge pot-smoking, anti-Vietnam War, authority-questioning hippies with the goal of resetting the attitudes of the Baby Boomers to the domesticated conformism of the 1950s. Instead, within the span of 55 years the globalized War on Drugs has blown up the 1960s counterculture of rebellious youth into an entire array of criminalized demimonde subcultures and expanded the market in forbidden substances 100-fold, entrenching illicit drug use as a teenage rite of passage and elevating features like subterfuge, concealment, and familiarity with outlaw behaviors to the status of an evolutionary adaptation within much of contemporary American society.
From Ben Westhoff’s Substack: