How the Internet Became the ‘Cookbook’ of the Drug Trade

In his fraternity room that night, July 22, 2023, Mr. Raydon started to feel sick. He took a cold shower, put on an anti-nausea bracelet and lay with his head on Ms. Buck’s lap. The pair had fallen hard for each other that spring. He was a neuropharmacology major, fascinated by the brain. “He was the most intellectually curious person I’d ever met,” she said.

She left after midnight; by then, she said, he was feeling better and had fallen asleep. The next day, when she couldn’t reach him, she came to check on him. She found him in bed, with Delilah perched on him. She thought he was asleep until she felt his cold body.

Katie Becker, a morgue supervisor for Boulder County, assisted in the autopsy. She noticed foam around his lips: a telltale sign of overdose, typically associated with fentanyl. The drug slows breathing and suppresses the gag reflex, causing fluid to build up in the air sacs, effectively drowning the user.

But a toxicology exam found no fentanyl. “There was nothing in the report that would explain the cause of death,” Ms. Becker said. “It was a mystery.”

The story of what happened to Mr. Raydon, and the detective story that followed, is a chilling example of the intimate relationship between well-intended science and the creators of the world’s most lethal drugs. By its end, the case would lead its scientific investigators unsettlingly close to their own doorstep.

A synthetic frontier

In 1971, President Richard Nixon began what became known as the war on drugs; that year, 6,771 Americans died of overdose. In 2024, 80,000 did, an increase of nearly 70 percent from just a decade earlier.

What has changed are the drugs. In the 1970s, the main targets — coca, poppies, marijuana — came from farms. Today, most illegal drugs are made in unregulated labs around the globe, from big enterprises in China and India to single-person operations run from anonymous apartments.

The drugs include fentanyl, but it is just one of hundreds of synthetic, ever more potent compounds known as novel psychoactive substances. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime now lists 1,446 new psychoactive substances, up from 643 a decade ago.

Experts refer to this trend as the “digitization of drugs.” Today, with the internet, virtually any esoteric molecular structure or chemistry study that is published online is instantly available to armchair chemists and illicit drug suppliers the world over.