Too Many Cooks
Too Many Cooks
Acetic Anhydride, We Build the Wall, Facebook, Apple, ISIS, the NRA, and Jerry Falwell Jr.
Acetic Anhydride
In addition to a respiratory virus, the US has spent years in the grips of another pandemic: opioid overdose. Some of that can be traced to the proliferation of fentanyl, and some is good old heroin.
Here’s a thing I learned - did you know heroin was invented by a guy trying to make morphine less addictive?
In 1874 an English chemist named Charles Alder Wright wanted to make morphine less addictive. He tried boiling it in acetic anhydride, which was used to process flavoring from vanilla beans and would later become critical to making aspirin and cigarette filters. Instead of weakening morphine’s grip, Alder Wright’s process yielded a narcotic several times more potent. Chemists at the German company Bayer AG developed the drug; one who tried it said he felt heroisch, or heroic, so Bayer branded it heroin. The name has never changed, and neither has the chemistry.
Huh! Well. That quote is from a Bloomberg exposé on American companies who produce much of the world’s acetic anhydride, the chemical Wright used to turn basic morphine into heroin. While it’s tightly controlled in most of the world, the chemical is effectively unregulated and easy to get in Mexico. Why is this a problem?
Mexico is the source of the vast majority of the heroin and meth sold in the U.S., where more than 142,000 people died from overdoses involving the two drugs from 2010 through 2018.
Oh, right. It’s easy to get in Mexico because companies like Avantor and Celanese manufacture and sell it in Mexico, so it’s not subject to any US laws. Convenient! Demand for acetic anhydride spiked in 2010, when US authorities cut off access to a main component used to make crystal meth, so cartels switched to using acetic anhydride for meth production as well.
It’s super convenient for the Mexican cartels that one of the building blocks for their most lucrative exports is available within the country, so it doesn’t trigger any flags:
The INCB recently analyzed every suspect acetic anhydride transaction and trafficking case worldwide, from 2016 through 2018, a period of intense activity. They didn’t find a single one involving Mexico. Investigators say that means the acetic anhydride used to make Mexico’s drugs is diverted from within the country’s legal trade.
The legal uses for the chemical include cigarette filters, aspirin, and fragrances. However the drug is sold in smaller quantities to “retail” buyers, who include narcos:
In terms of volume, the retail market is dwarfed by industrial sales, but its small containers are well-suited to the cottage-industry nature of heroin production. Retailers and distributors say Avantor’s jugs and large glass bottles of acetic anhydride, ostensibly sold for use in clinical labs, are popular with narcos and easy to get. It’s one of Avantor’s most heavily stocked retail products in Mexico
Comparative to the needs of a large-scale cigarette manufacturer, the sale of a few hundred jugs of acetic anhydride isn’t going to alarm anyone. Or, at least, not in a country that has turned a blind eye to regulating it for almost two decades:
In two interviews earlier this year, Elvira Espinosa, who heads the regulation of drugmaking chemicals in Mexico, defended the record of her agency, the Federal Commission for Protection Against Sanitary Risk, or Cofepris. She said regulators waited almost 18 years to tighten control of acetic anhydride because they viewed the more stringent international regulations as unnecessary and too costly for companies. The change came after regulators realized small quantities were being sold widely in Mexico and that very little was needed to make drugs, she said.
Ah yes, we’d hate to impose basic safety controls on the active ingredient in heroin, it might be costly for companies! So, in 2018 the Mexican government passed new rules that they claimed would make it much harder to acquire the chemical. How’d that go?
On the first anniversary of Mexico’s tighter regulations, a Bloomberg reporter purchased a 1-liter bottle of J.T. Baker acetic anhydride over the counter at Química Barley, a medical-supply store in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital, where nurse uniforms hang from clotheslines above customers’ heads. The manager volunteered that he could get an 18-liter jug in three days. His only requirement was advance payment. His shop advertised J.T. Baker on its Facebook page.
[…]
Days later, the reporter arranged the purchase of an 18-liter jug of J.T. Baker via the Mexican operation of MercadoLibre Inc., the leading e-commerce site in Latin America. Each jug can make 90,000 hits of pure white heroin.
Very good. It’s unclear how much of Avantor’s business is selling chemicals to Mexican cartels, but it was significant enough that company executives pushed to drive sales in Mexico ahead of an IPO in 2019:
A former executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said U.S. managers pushed for increased Mexican sales in 2018 before the stock sale—the second-largest initial public offering on Wall Street last year. Avantor gave distributors incentives, including discounts for advance payment, which helped boost overall sales in Mexico more than 20%, the former executive said.
Avantor racked up some other dubious honors:
Before the runup to the IPO, Avantor also became the only U.S. company to have international sales of its acetic anhydride blocked by authorities from 2016 through 2018, according to officials involved and INCB records. The attempted sales, in 2017, were to a suspicious buyer in the United Arab Emirates, identified by U.S. officials as a hub for Afghan heroin traffickers.
Seem like good people! There’s also Celanese, who are likely a major supplier to the cartels, witting or unwittingly:
Celanese has singlehandedly made Mexico one of the world’s major producers of acetic anhydride. It accounted for the vast majority of the 285 million liters the country exported last year. Its plant in the state of Veracruz holds at least 97% of Mexico’s production capacity
Celanese makes a lot of cigarette filters, but it’s likely a significant amount of its chemicals end up in narco hands - remember, it doesn’t take much acetic anhydride to make heroin or meth.
Anyhow, it absolutely rules that multi-billion dollar American corporations are exploiting legal loopholes to supply the key ingredient to Mexican drug cartels, who turn it into heroin and meth and sell it right back into the US. Happy Friday.
The Power of Crowds
News broke last week of the arrest of Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager and hot tub enthusiast. The media loves a palace intrigue story, and it has been reported nearly to death. The White House has tried to distance itself from Bannon’s group, but of course there’s ample evidence they were entwined. We Build the Wall touted links to the president, and blanketed social media with cheesy fundraising pitches.
It seems this wasn’t the only illegal non-profit Bannon was involved with, however, as the Department of Justice revealed in his indictment:
The group is Citizens of the American Republic, a California-based nonprofit that serves as a platform for Bannon’s films and podcasts that promote Trump’s ideology. Throughout the 24-page indictment, the group appears to be referenced as “Non-Profit-1”
[…]
The indictment alleges that “Non-Profit-1” received over $1 million through the scheme and funneled part of it to Brian Kolfage, the military veteran who raised money to build a privately funded wall to help Trump block off the southern border.
Ah, sure. Coincidentally, We Build the Wall funneled $1 million to Bannon. As they unraveled Bannon’s other shady group, prosecutors found a right-wing news site and a mask scam, because of course they did:
In addition to Bannon’s nonprofit and We Build the Wall, federal investigators are moving to seize assets from four other entities, including two affiliated with Kolfage — a defunct right-wing news site called Freedom Daily that operated out of Florida and America First Medical, a medical supplies company Kolfage formed in Wyoming to sell masks in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The article hints at the tangled web of non-profits everyone in the White House orbit appears to have:
…the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, led by Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore.
I realize this is a way for these grifters to funnel money to themselves but, like many things this administration has done, it seems like a lot of work for not a lot of reward. Non-profit organizations have filing and legal requirements, which keep tripping up people who would clearly rather just use the money to buy boats. Why not just have these rich donors pay you directly for consulting or access to the president? I am probably missing something about the way Washington, D.C. works.
Facebook
The social media giant has an extremely spotty track record of policing its platform in other countries. Part of the problem is that Facebook is run by a 36-year-old white dude in California, who has overseen a massive growth strategy around the world, without giving much thought to how people would use the platform in those places. Zuckerberg probably thought he was doing a good thing for the world when he pledged billions of dollars to bring better Internet to Africa, but has the result been a net positive?
The BBC details the ways Facebook has been used to influence elections and spread fake news on the continent:
In 2018, Facebook and British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica were at the centre of a dispute over the harvesting and use of personal data of more than 230 million users, using it to try and alter how people voted in multiple countries including Nigeria and Kenya.
[...]
[Facebook] banned Archimedes Group, which it said was responsible for a network of those masquerading as African nationals, and removed 265 Facebook and Instagram pages and groups involved in "co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour" mainly targeting Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia.
Far more horrifying are stories like this one, about death squads among Kenya’s police force using Facebook to identify targets for extra-judicial killings:
"They profile them on Facebook, after one week or a month they shoot them, and put pictures of their dead bodies on Facebook," Wilfred Olal from the Dandora Community Justice Centre told the meeting.
The posted photos, sometimes showing close-up shots of heads split open by bullets and eviscerated bodies, usually come with a warning that the same fate awaits other criminals. Some of the images are blurred by Facebook but a user can choose to un-blur them.
Buzzfeed News has a story about how scammers are using Facebook ads to steal identities by impersonating consumer brands in Kenya:
The link brought Elizabeth (not her real name) to a Google Form that asked her for her name and identification card number, a unique ID that Kenyans use for official activities like registering their SIM cards, opening bank accounts, and obtaining government services. She sent what the form called a loan fee of 310 Kenyan shillings ($3) via a mobile transfer to a man named Anthony Muriungi, who claimed to be a “loans agent officer.”
She soon realized she’d been scammed.
Every time a story like this comes out, we’re reminded that despite Facebook’s growth across the globe and wild profitability, it spends almost no money on the necessary staff to police its platform. In 2019 they said:
"To imply that we are using Africa as 'a testing ground' is simply wrong and inaccurate. Facebook's commitment within the region remains strong, and over the past two years we have dedicated unprecedented resources and investments across the continent including establishing teams of product, policy, and operations experts with local language and local context expertise," it added.
Those “unprecedented resources” are, according to Buzzfeed, a complete joke:
Since 2016, Facebook has invested in artificial intelligence and human fact-checkers and reviewers. Of the company's estimated 30,000 global content reviewers, 130 are based in Nairobi, the company’s only sub-Saharan Africa content review center. It is run by Samasource, a company headquartered in San Francisco that provides data labeling services for AI technologies.
Facebook made $18.5 billion dollars in profit in 2019, and they’ve got 130 people fact checking half of Africa. The company partners with local news and fact-checking organizations as well, but people at those organizations admit the task is nearly impossible:
“This is a widespread problem that we’ve been facing on Facebook. We have been seeing a lot of these scams,” [Alphonce] Shiundu said. “It’s been a game of whack-a-mole with these scammers on Facebook. When we spot one and rate it as false, they open another one and another one. We have basically been chasing them around Facebook.”
What he doesn’t mention is that the reason these scams are allowed to proliferate is Facebook’s software is designed to spread them. You can have all the fact checkers and scam catchers you want, but when your platform is built around driving user engagement and anyone can be an “advertiser” with a few mouse clicks, you aren’t going to solve the problem. Facebook is built to show people things they’re likely to click on, and convincing scams are very clickable!
Something I’ve thought about is what the world would look like without Facebook. Five or ten years ago, the technology probably didn’t exist for a plucky entrepreneur to build a robust social network in, say, Uganda. But now! Cloud computing has become inexpensive and ubiquitous. Mobile phones are available everywhere. Making apps is easier than ever. Each new story about Facebook makes it clear the company is both incapable and unwilling to address the serious social and global problems it’s created. Countries should start banning the app, and allow new social networks into the marketplace. They couldn’t be any worse than the one we have now, where Nazis congregate, cults spread dangerous misinformation, and the police post snuff pics of dead gang members.
Apple
In the midst of their very public fight with the creator of Fortnite (and with Facebook, apparently), Apple has announced a far more consequential change to their iOS mobile operating system:
Sometime next month, iPhone users will start seeing a new question when they use many of the apps on their devices: Do they want the app to follow them around the internet, tracking their behavior?
It’s a simple query, with potentially significant consequences. Apple is trying to single-handedly change the way internet advertising works.
I’m no fan of Apple, but in this case the enemy of my enemy is my friend:
Facebook and other big ad players make billions of dollars tracing the detailed digital footprints their users leave — but they can also argue that ad money they generate allows people to consume news, entertainment, and the rest of the internet for free.
Facebook’s argument is that if they aren’t allowed to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue selling advertisements on their platform and around the Internet, people will have to pay more for news and entertainment? Yeah, okay bro.
How this works, and why Facebook is so upset, is that Apple will now require app publishers - including Facebook - to ask user permission to track their behavior across other apps and websites. Facebook anticipates that most people will say no, which will dramatically limit their “re-targeting” options, or the ability to serve ads in multiple places based on behavioral data.
I will get on my Ad Man soapbox for a minute and say: this is not a big deal for the advertising industry. Ad prices will not skyrocket, and it will not suddenly become cost prohibitive for small business to advertise online. It will cause Facebook and Google to make significantly less money, because they cannot charge the same premium for showing targeted ads:
Other publishers say the move away from targeted ads could conceivably be a good thing for them because it would lessen the advantage Google and Facebook get from combining their massive pools of data about users’ behavior on their own app with the information they collect about what they do outside their apps.
Like me, some of the people Facebook is attempting to hide behind are skeptical this will make much of a difference:
For example, the New York Times, which had already announced that it would be phasing out the use of data collected by other companies to target ads for its readers, says it simply won’t use third-party tracking data for its Apple app this fall once the changes kick in.
Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, who heads up strategic partnerships for the Times, says the move creates “some loss” of advertising revenue, but it will be “minimal.”
Think of it this way - before Facebook and Google took over the world, people saw advertisements all the time. They weren’t micro-targeted to a person’s specific interests, and that was just fine. The planet continued to turn. As we’ve seen just this week, Facebook’s targeting is often used for very bad stuff, and the company has no desire to stop it. Apple’s crusade for personal privacy may be coming at the right time, especially with a presidential election on the horizon.
In related news, more browsers are moving to block third-party cookies, which is also good for many of the same reasons.
ISIS
A couple weeks ago I wrote about how ISIS had been using Facebook to sell stolen Syrian artifacts to fund their terror operations. Well, you can’t keep a good caliphate down because they’re in on mask scams too:
ISIS allegedly used the website facemaskcenter.com as a front for peddling fake N-95 masks, according to a senior Department of Justice official. Their targets allegedly included hospitals, nursing homes and first responders.
For fuck’s sake. Please do not buy a mask from ISIS. They sell them at Walgreen’s now.
The NRA
The same week I wrote about ISIS, I talked a little about the lawsuit against the NRA. I said:
I am sure more articles will be written in the coming months as the NRA spends whatever money it has left fighting the case and begging for donations…
What I did not expect was that one of the principal defendants in the case would write…a book about it? What?
Josh Powell, one of the group’s highest-ranking former executives, is poised to release “Inside the NRA: A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed and Paranoia Within the Most Powerful Political Group in America.” Mr. Powell, former chief of staff to Wayne LaPierre, the group’s longtime chief executive, says the N.R.A. is “rife with fraud and corruption” and writes that its finances “are in shambles,” and that “it has operated in the red for the past three years, despite annual revenues of roughly $350 million.”
But…you were one of the guys doing the fraud?
Mr. Powell declined to discuss the attorney general’s lawsuit, which depicted him as a failed businessman with a trail of lawsuits, who had “routine disregard” for N.R.A. policies regarding expenses and contracts, and who was known for “abusive behavior towards N.R.A. and vendor staff.” Among the accusations leveled at him is that a consulting firm hired by the N.R.A. paid Mr. Powell’s wife $30,000 a month as an independent contractor, that he “took affirmative steps to hide the conflict,” and that he interceded to have his father hired as a photographer for N.R.A. events, according to the complaint.
A real Captain Renault moment, to be sure. Powell had attempted to run multiple high-end outdoor brands, only to skip out on bills when they inevitably failed. He ingratiated himself with some powerful NRA board members, and landed a job high in the ranks of LaPierre’s cabal, where he set about enriching himself and his family members.
I will say, it is a bold move to write a tell-all book as you’re facing charges for the things you’re accusing everyone else of in your tell-all book. Hopefully the New York AG can’t go after his publishing money too.
Jerry Falwell Jr.
In my second-ever newsletter, almost a year ago now, I wrote about Jerry Falwell Jr. and his, uh, tendency to give lots of money to young men who spent a conspicuous amount of time around his wife. Also his use of Liberty University as a personal piggy bank.
Well, what a difference a year makes. This week, news broke that Falwell had resigned from the board of Liberty after Reuters published a report that a former “business partner” had a sexual relationship with Becki Falwell. Falwell Jr. was already on leave from the school because he’d posted an either-pre-or-post-coital photo with another woman while on vacation.
Liberty U released a statement saying Falwell was stepping down. Then Falwell denied those reports. Then Liberty U said no, he’s really leaving. Then Falwell finally resigned, and has negotiated $10 million in an exit package. What a ride.
I am glad something has finally happened to the guy, and it puts a nice bow on one of the first stories I wrote about when I started this newsletter. Bon voyage, Jerry.
Short Cons
ProPublica - “A PG&E employee received a $4.5 million Bay Area home from a vendor, and sold it right back a month later, records show. Later, the utility accused the vendor of bribery for unspecified actions.”
Security Magazine - “During New Year's Eve, Travelex was hit by a Sodinokibi (REvil) ransomware variant, forcing its website offline and impacting its bricks-and-mortar stores and banking services for more than two weeks. This, coupled with COVID-19's effect on air travel, drove the company into bankruptcy…”
WOWK - “The Better Business Bureau is warning consumers about Noom, a popular app-based weight loss service. […] According to complaints made to BBB, consumers reportedly try to cancel the trial offer before it ends but still end up being billed for the subscription.”
Washington Post - “Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office. At least $570,000 came as a result of the president’s travel, according to a Post analysis.”
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