- Casey, Doug and John Hunt.
Drug Lord.
Charlottesville, VA: HighGround Books, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-947449-07-7.
-
This is the second novel in the authors' “High Ground”
series, chronicling the exploits of Charles Knight, an entrepreneur
and adventurer determined to live his life according to his own
moral code, constrained as little as possible by the rules and
regulations of coercive and corrupt governments. The first
novel, Speculator (October 2016),
follows Charles's adventures in Africa as an investor in a
junior gold exploration company which just might have made
the discovery of the century, and in the financial markets as he
seeks to profit from what he's learned digging into the details.
Charles comes onto the radar of ambitious government agents seeking
to advance their careers by collecting his scalp.
Charles ends up escaping with his freedom and ethics intact, but
with much of his fortune forfeit. He decides he's had enough of
“the land of the free” and sets out on his sailboat
to explore the world and sample the pleasures and opportunities
it holds for one who thinks for himself.
Having survived several attempts on his life and prevented a war
in Africa in the previous novel, seven years later he returns to a
really dangerous place, Washington DC, populated by
the Morlocks of Mordor.
Charles has an idea for a new business. The crony capitalism of
the U.S. pharmaceutical-regulatory complex has inflated the price
of widely-used prescription drugs to many times that paid
outside the U.S., where these drugs, whose patents have expired
under legal regimes less easily manipulated than that of the U.S.,
are manufactured in a chemically-identical form by thoroughly
professional generic drug producers. Charles understands, as fully
as any engineer, that wherever there is nonlinearity the possibility
for gain exists, and when that nonlinearity is the result of the
action of coercive government, the potential profits from circumventing
its grasp on the throat of the free market can be very large,
indeed.
When Charles's boat docked in the U.S., he had an undeclared cargo:
a large number of those little blue pills much in demand by men
of a certain age, purchased for pennies from a factory in India through
a cut-out in Africa he met on his previous adventure. He has the
product, and a supplier able to obtain much more. Now, all he needs
is distribution. He must venture into the dark underside of DC to
make the connections that can get the product to the customers, and
persuade potential partners that they can make much more and far more
safely by distributing his products (which don't fall under the
purview of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and to which local cops not only
don't pay much attention, but may be potential customers).
Meanwhile, Charles's uncle Maurice, who has been managing what was
left of his fortune during his absence, has made an investment in
a start-up pharmaceutical company, Visioryme, whose first product,
VR-210, or Sybillene, is threading its way through the FDA regulatory
gauntlet toward approval for use as an antidepressant. Sybillene works
through a novel neurochemical pathway, and promises to be an effective
treatment for clinical depression while avoiding the many deleterious
side effects of other drugs. In fact, Sybillene doesn't appear to
have any side effects at all—or hardly any—there's that
one curious thing that happened in animal testing, but not wishing
to commit corporate seppuku, Visioryme hasn't mentioned it to the
regulators or even their major investor, Charles.
Charles pursues his two pharmaceutical ventures in parallel: one in the
DC ghetto and Africa; the other in the tidy suburban office park
where Visioryme is headquartered. The first business begins to
prosper, and Charles must turn his ingenuity to solving the problems
attendant to any burgeoning enterprise: supply, transportation,
relations with competitors (who, in this sector of the economy,
not only are often armed but inclined to shoot first), expanding
the product offerings, growing the distribution channels, and
dealing with all of the money that's coming in, entirely in cash,
without coming onto the radar of any of the organs of the slavers
and their pervasive snooper-state.
Meanwhile, Sybillene finally obtains FDA approval, and Visioryme begins
to take off and ramp up production. Charles's connections in Africa
help the company obtain the supplies of bamboo required in production
of the drug. It seems like he now has two successful ventures, on
the dark and light sides, respectively, of the pharmaceutical
business (which is dark and which is light depending on your view
of the FDA).
Then, curious reports start to come in about doctors prescribing
Sybillene off-label in large doses to their well-heeled
patients. Off-label prescription is completely legal and not
uncommon, but one wonders what's going on. Then there's the talk
Charles is picking up from his other venture of demand for
a new drug on the street: Sybillene, which goes under names such
as Fey, Vatic, Augur, Covfefe, and most commonly, Naked Emperor.
Charles's lead distributor reports, “It helps people see
lies for what they are, and liars too. I dunno. I never tried
it. Lots of people are asking though. Society types. Lawyers,
businessmen, doctors, even cops.” It appears that
Sybillene, or Naked Emperor, taken in a high dose, is a powerful
nootropic which doesn't so much increase intelligence as, the
opposite of most psychoactive drugs, allows the user to think
more clearly, and see through the deception that
pollutes the intellectual landscape of a modern,
“developed”, society.
In that fœtid city by the Potomac, the threat posed by such
clear thinking dwarfs that of other “controlled
substances” which merely turn their users into zombies.
Those atop an empire built on deceit, deficits, and debt cannot
run the risk of a growing fraction of the population beginning to
see through the funny money, Ponzi financing, Potemkin
military, manipulation of public opinion, erosion of
the natural rights of citizens, and the sham which is replacing
the last vestiges of consensual government. Perforce, Sybillene must
become Public Enemy Number One, and if a bit of lying and
even murder is required, well, that's the price of preserving
the government's ability to lie and murder.
Suddenly, Charles is involved in two illegal pharmaceutical
ventures. As any wise entrepreneur would immediately ask himself,
“might there be synergies?”
Thus begins a compelling, instructive, and inspiring tale of
entrepreneurship and morality confronted with dark forces constrained
by no limits whatsoever. We encounter friends and foes from the first
novel, as once again Charles finds himself on point position
defending those in the enterprises he has created. As I said in my
review of Speculator, this book reminds me of
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead,
but it is even more effective because Charles Knight is not a
super-hero but rather a person with a strong sense of right and
wrong who is making up his life as he goes along and learning
from the experiences he has: good and bad, success and failure.
Charles Knight, even without Naked Emperor, has that gift of seeing
things precisely as they are, unobscured by the fog, cant, spin, and
lies which are the principal products of the city in which it is set.
These novels are not just page-turning thrillers, they're
simultaneously an introductory course in becoming an international
man (or woman), transcending the lies of the increasingly obsolescent
nation-state, and finding the liberty that comes from seizing control
of one's own destiny. They may be the most powerful fictional
recruiting tool for the libertarian and anarcho-capitalist world
view since the works of Ayn Rand and
L. Neil Smith.
Speculator was my fiction
book of the year
for 2016, and this sequel is in the running for 2017.
August 2017 