Hello, ghost story listeners. This is PJ Vote, here to tell you about my new show. It's called

search engine. Each week I try to answer a question about the world, no question too big, no question

too small. In case you want to check the show out, here's a short preview of one of our episodes where we try to answer a question that really confounded me and it turns out a lot of other people as well.

Why are drug dealers poisoning their own customers by sneaking fencil into other drugs?

All right, here we go. I'm PJ Vote.

There have been all these stories about people dying from fentanyl laced drugs.

I read these stories in the news, I just hear them in my community, fentanyl laced cocaine,

Xanax, synthetic weed.

But the question I've always had seemed kind of like a simple one,

maybe bordering on naive.

Why would a drug dealer do this?

Like, why would you sneak a very lethal drug into drugs that are much less lethal or in some cases not lethal at all?

I want to say I am a sophisticated enough adult to understand that drug dealers are not like the most well-regulated or

universally altruistic class of business person.

But still, even an illegal business is a business.

What kind of business survives

while killing its own customers?

It didn't even seem to make sense in ruthless capitalism logic.

We got an answer, which we're going to share with you.

But we're going to tell you the story a little bit differently than how we normally would.

Let's begin.

A small town in the north of Belgium.

...