His first foreign assignment was at a lab that had made the stimulant MDMA in Jakarta, Indonesia. In time, Bozenko began traveling abroad to clandestine labs after they’d been seized. He analyzed what they produced and worked out how they did it. Bozenko’s job was to understand the thinking of black-market chemists, samples of whose work were regularly plopped on his desk. “Chemist by day, chemist by night,” his Twitter bio once read.īozenko had joined the DEA seven years earlier, just as the global underworld was veering toward synthetic drugs and away from their plant-based cousins. Bozenko, a garrulous man with a wide smile, worked in the DEA lab during the day and taught chemistry at a local university in the evenings. The field seems to breed folks whose every waking minute is spent puzzling over chemical reactions. Organic chemistry can be endlessly manipulated, with compounds that, like Lego bricks, can be used to build almost anything.
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