What’s in your cocaine and the questions Search Engine CAN’T answer

**PJ Vogt** (0:00)
Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. So this summer, as the Search Engine production team rests and recharges, we are playing you some of our favorite segments from our vault, our premium feed, which we call Incognito Mode. These are just some of the extra interviews that we share with our paid subscribers for a mere five bucks a month, what a steal. This week, we are sharing two segments. The first was Extended Reporting into Illicit Markets, an interview with a cocaine salesman. The second was a kind of game show we built to highlight the depths of my ignorance. Please enjoy.
So in Search Engine's first year, I'd had this question that come up while I was doing some reporting about fentanyl.
I was talking to a journalist named Ben Westoff, and I wondered about something that had not made sense to me. Drug dealers were putting fentanyl into drugs like cocaine, but I didn't understand why the users of those drugs weren't noticing. Because presumably, a stimulant like cocaine and an opiate like fentanyl offer very different highs. So I asked Ben about it. One of the things I find confusing about that is that, my assumption is that a stimulant user, like a cocaine user would notice, hey, this is like a different high. Like why is it possible to cut it into drugs that are supposed to have very different reactions?

**Ben Westoff** (1:27)
The first thing I think is that, cocaine in America is so adulterated, and it has been for so long, that Americans have no idea what real cocaine is actually like. I've heard from people who've had a pure that it's basically like, it's more like ecstasy actually. It gives you this euphoric feeling rather than this sort of like manic high and that it lasts a long time.
So that's the first thing. And the second thing is I think that just users aren't really in a position to complain, and as long as they're getting high at all, I think most people probably are satisfied with their coke being cut with fentanyl.

**PJ Vogt** (2:09)
So Ben said essentially that the quality of illicit drugs in America is so bad, most of the time users don't even know what they're supposed to be getting. Like cocaine users in America might not even know what actual cocaine feels like. I found that idea very interesting, so I took it to another person, a drug dealer we're going to call Nate.
We ended up having a very frank conversation, me and this person who has been in the illicit drug market for a very long time. It felt like the kind of interview that deserved to stand on its own, and also potentially as a PSA for people who use drugs like cocaine or ketamine.
Nate told me stories about his professional life, scenes from the complicated world of trying to figure out which drugs are safe to sell and which aren't. And he had some advice about how people could try to stay safe in a completely unregulated drug market. To protect his identity, we've changed his voice with AI. Here's Nate.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:06)
Hello. Hey.

**PJ Vogt** (3:08)
Hey, how's it going?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:09)
Siri thinks your last name is pronounced Vought.

**PJ Vogt** (3:12)
Honestly, that means Siri is doing at least as well as most human beings. Everybody is Vought or Voight.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:19)
How's it pronounced?

**PJ Vogt** (3:20)
Voight, Voight, like what you do in an election.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:23)
That's great. That's a great last name.

**PJ Vogt** (3:25)
Nate sells drugs for a living. He has a successful business in a major US city, selling hard drugs to all sorts of people.
He doesn't sell fentanyl. He doesn't sell heroin. He's a person who sells many other drugs, including cocaine. Can you tell me, do you remember the first time you heard of fentanyl? What is the story of fentanyl as it hit you from your perspective?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:46)
Well, I mean, I have always tested everything that I sell. I just have to personally test it, because it's like an ethical responsibility. And so I got these fentanyl strips.
I didn't know exactly what it was. It was before it was so widespread, and people were dying left and right.

**PJ Vogt** (4:08)
What year do you think this was?

**SPEAKER_3** (4:09)
2019 maybe.

**PJ Vogt** (4:11)
Okay.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:11)
Not that long ago. And the primary method of testing for fentanyl is highly flawed.
It gives almost half the time of positives.

**PJ Vogt** (4:23)
Oh, wow.
Nate says that now there are new fentanyl test strips, which work much better. They yield fewer positives and are easier to use. You can find them at dancesafe.org. But in the early days when the test strips didn't work as well, and people were very scared, Nate was fielding a lot of angry phone calls.