Among the Bros by Max Marshall

Author:Max Marshall [Marshall, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

When Zackery Kligman told his customers that sticks were being made, he usually didn’t describe how much work it took to manufacture your own Xanax bars. Each time he dropped off an envelope of chalky benzos and rode away on his longboard, he was making a hard process look casual. Zack’s customers knew him as a guy who slept past lunch and “partied all night,” but he and his colleagues spent vast amounts of effort running a clandestine alprazolam manufacturing lab. They’d realized they’d make more money if they manufactured their pills themselves, and now they used black market chemicals and industrial methods to make counterfeit Xanax at scale. Before any C of C student took a GG249 bar to chill out or black out, Zack and his superiors had guided the pill on a long, strange supply chain.

Each GG249 tablet started as raw alprazolam powder in a black-market Chinese factory. Connected to East Asian manufacturers by a dark web user in Quebec, Zack’s boss ordered over nine pounds of powder at a time. It arrived in North America inside printer cartridges labeled with Mandarin characters. Each cartridge was paid for in Bitcoin and shipped to one of a few destinations around the Low Country, where the organization unpacked it and drove it to a pop-up laboratory. A good alprazolam manufacturing site is hard to find—it needs to be quiet and unassuming, but not so nice that you don’t mind wrecking it with benzodiazepine dust—but luckily a member of their operation had a friend who worked for a beach house rental company. The team found vacation homes in Isle of Palms or Sullivan’s Island, where they’d listen to Jet Skis running through the marshes and get alprazolam powder ready for their industrial press.

The beach house pill press, a TDP 5, weighed more than 275 pounds and also came from mainland China via the dark web. It was a Willy Wonka–like collection of wheels and levers powered by an electric motor attached to a drive belt. Running the TDP 5 required an engineer’s facility with mechanics and a chemist’s skill with toxic blends, and in this case the whole operation was coordinated by a thirty-three-year-old former University of South Carolina fraternity member named Eric Hughes. In 2013, under the username “Casey Jones,” Eric had been the first citizen in American history to have his Bitcoin seized by the DEA, and now he sold counterfeit Xanax on the dark web under the name “Genius Bar.” Pouring roughly 3,966 grams of Prosolv binding agent and 34 grams of alprazolam powder into a plastic tote, Eric mixed the materials using a concrete auger bit, and then he funneled his blend into the press.

Once Eric and his colleagues poured their mix into the funnel and pressed the big green button on the TDP 5, the motor rattled and the belt started to turn 1,400 times a minute. Each time it stamped another bit of dough into a perforated GG249 rectangle, it made a loud thump.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.