INSIDE THE BOOK
The Synthetic Age follows fentanyl's medical beginnings, the designer-drug trade, online markets and laws chasing a supply that keeps changing. A hospital medicine, a research compound and an illicit pill can end up in the same argument. This book follows the differences, and the people who profit when the conversation becomes too confused to follow.
Names change. Markets disappear. A prosecution produces a face for the news; a new formula produces another problem for the people writing the rules. The language of the crisis keeps being updated. At the clinic, somebody still has to answer a much older question: is this person breathing?
There is astonishing ingenuity in making and moving molecules. The excuses arrive when it is time to protect the people exposed to them. I find this outrageous. I also find it easy to forget once I get home. My ability to move on is one of the less frequently advertised benefits of money.
The clinic has a naloxone kit, unmatched chairs and a collection jar. I write a check. It helps, and it also gives me something pleasant to think about myself. I would prefer that you admire the gesture before considering how easily I could afford it.
Follow the chemistry far enough and you arrive at that luxury: treating somebody else's emergency as an interesting subject.
The future has a research budget. The clinic has a jar.