In OneZero. More on Medium.
In 2017, Mike Arnold saw an opportunity so big that it changed the course of his life. After representing several black-market cannabis farmers as a criminal defense attorney, he noticed popular perception of the plant was shifting. Laws were loosening, more people were partaking, and research was increasingly showing that cannabis was perhaps not that bad for you—and maybe even at times good for you. For Arnold, that meant one thing: If he got in early on the industry, he could make bank.
That year, Arnold left law and launched a cannabis startup. He raised $2 million in investments in…
When Javier Rojas’ phone buzzed with an order for a packet of tablets this past July, nothing seemed amiss at first. In Argentina, delivery apps Glovo and Rappi allow users to send and receive all kinds of things, and couriers like Rojas are accustomed to delivering takeaways, documents, and forgotten keys across the city. But when they say you can order anything, that —in practice—can really mean anything, as Rojas would find out.
The address was a regular house, but alarm bells rang as soon as he saw the package. It was supposed to be a box of Berocca vitamin…
In 2014, two 18-year-old roommates in Grand Forks, North Dakota, named Bailey Henke and Kain Schwandt, were unraveling from opioid addictions. Over Christmas vacation, they took a road trip, trying to kick their habits. They brought along Suboxone, a drug that helps ease withdrawal. And it seemed to work. They both came home clean.
Within days, though, they relapsed. A friend procured a dozen grams of heroin and a gram of fentanyl — both bought from the now defunct darknet site Evolution. This fentanyl wasn’t the pharmaceutical-grade version that had been around for decades. Rather, it was made thousands of…
Paul Farrell paced the courtroom as lawyers filed into place: plaintiffs on the left, defendants to the right, briefcases down, folders out. Outside the chambers, Lake Erie glistened through the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the marble hallway of the Carl B. Stokes U.S. Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. Farrell, who has silver hair and grayish-blue eyes that can maintain eye contact for an uncomfortably long period of time, darted around the room for hushed conversations and banter with his fellow lawyers. Farrell was restless for the proceedings to start. …
By the time Judith Grisel turned 23, it had been years since she had gone so much as a day “without a drink, pill, fix, or joint,” she says now. Homeless in South Florida, Grisel stole credit cards to feed her habit, got kicked out of three colleges, and ultimately began shooting cocaine. At one point, while doing cocaine with a Vietnam vet named Johnny, the man overdosed. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he began convulsing. Grisel’s response? “He probably won’t want his next bump,” she remembers.
As Grisel writes in her new book, Never Enough: The…