Ben Westhoff: belief

Transcript context

…Given that Belgian scientist Paul Janssen synthesized fentanyl as long ago as 1969 — before the rate of productivity growth slowed down — what took so long for the drug to really spread? That’s a long lag. I think a lot of it has to do with the internet. Initially, he and other scientists who were making these new drugs published them in papers, and they were in obscure university libraries. There were some examples of fentanyl appearing on the streets in the ’80s, for example, but after the internet, then all of these university papers went online, so these rogue chemists could access them. Now, with fentanyl, it’s not just fentanyl; it’s all the analogs of fentanyl, which are made by just slightly tweaking the chemical formula. Then you have something 10 times as strong as fentanyl, for example. The scientists who were all studying these analogs, coming up with them, published their papers, and these chemists were able to find them online. So it’s the product differentiation, eventually, that drove it, and the product differentiation required the internet to get the basic formula and then to spread the variants?…

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