The drug coursed through his arm like white phosphorus, he said, leaving a scorched trail in its wake.
Rather than slowly nod off, as he did with fentanyl, Hapkomah collapsed immediately, while still on his feet, he said. When he came to, he said, his vein was destroyed. For most of his adult life, he had abused drugs, a shocking journey he chronicled in his viral blog. Yet now, for the first time, he said, he was afraid.
His small country, Estonia, has long been on the frontline of a drastic change in the drug trade: One of the first nations in the world to be bludgeoned by fentanyl, it is battling even stronger synthetics that the authorities struggle to identify, let alone stop.
Hapkomah, his pseudonym, quickly became an underground celebrity in this terrifying shift, known for his raw, unvarnished blogs on how ruthlessly these new substances were tearing through his body and the world around him.
Tens of thousands of people in Estonia have read his short confessional posts, following his blunt, sometimes grotesque accounts of his descent in a 21st-century cross between William S. Burroughs and Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.”
“My bones ache, my skin flushes, bodily fluids drip from my ass, and my muscles are cramping,” Hapkomah, which means junkie, wrote of a withdrawal episode in his first post.
His writings amount to a street-level archive of Estonia’s crisis, narrating the demise of other addicts like himself on the edges of society: a woman raped daily by her husband’s friends in exchange for synthetic opioids; a dealer who feels nothing for the users he kills with his potent wares.
Some credit his work with forcing the government to pay attention to the extreme dangers of synthetic drugs, especially at a time when much of the world was still blind to them.
“It was huge,” said Margus Hanno Murakas, a former journalist for an Estonian newspaper, Postimees, who has focused on drugs in Estonia. “The guy blew the lid open.”
As Estonia did the remarkable and got fentanyl under control — an accomplishment the United States can only hope to replicate — newer lab-made concoctions emerged almost immediately. Hapkomah soon realized that dealers rarely had a clue what they were selling him. Only one constant was clear to him. The substances on the streets kept getting worse — as his own body could attest.
“People are right to say they miss fentanyl,” he told me in an interview last year, repeating a surprisingly common refrain among addicts and law enforcement officials in Estonia. While the fentanyl crisis that gripped the nation for years was devastating, they say it now seems so much milder than the scourge of ultra-potent new synthetics attacking the country today.
His pseudonym enabled him to unveil Estonia’s drug crisis without being prosecuted for his long involvement in the underworld. As he sat for the interview on the condition that his real name not be used, his fear of the crippling withdrawal that would soon overtake him intensified. His knees bounced and hands fidgeted while he described the cruelty of synthetic drugs, like nitazenes, that had replaced fentanyl.
The highs are shorter, the withdrawals kick in faster and they are a lot more severe, he said, a perspective shared by more than a dozen current and former addicts I interviewed in Estonia. What’s more, they added, that punishing cycle gets worse every time a new iteration of nitazene hits the street.
That is the quixotic struggle between cops and criminals in the synthetic era: The authorities race to ban poisonous new drugs, inadvertently spurring clandestine chemists to come up with something new and, often, even more powerful.
These days, nitazenes change regularly to outpace each new ban, which is how Estonia came to have more than a dozen different kinds crowding the market. Hapkomah had tried all of them, he said, and called nitazenes far more destructive than anything that came before them.
That is, until last year, shortly after our interview — when he came across drugs that were even worse.
Just a few years after nitazenes stormed across Estonia, new substances were suddenly popping up across the country, drugs so powerful that they knocked him out while standing and fired through his arm like a tracer round.
The agonizing withdrawals came on so quickly that he woke up in the middle of the night, needing to inject again.
“You go to bed at 11, wake up at 3 am drenched in sweat, and shoot up,” he texted on an encrypted app. “Then I’m up again at 7 am, looking for the next bag.”
It got so bad that he shot up in his neck, struggling to find a vein, and gave himself an infection. He called the new drugs, and the effect they had on him, “demonic.”
As his addiction deepened, he said, he called for an ambulance two dozen times in February and March of 2025, convulsing and struggling to breathe.
“I honestly feel like killing myself with a gun if I find no help,” he texted me one morning.
Whatever part of his life had remained intact with nitazenes — whatever semblance of self, routine or individuality he’d managed to hold onto — these new drugs were eradicating it.
And he still wasn’t sure what they were.
“Was foaming at the mouth, flying in a 50 kmh zone towards the bag,” he wrote another day. “I’ve lost all hope.”
Spiraling completely, Hapkomah begged rehab centers to take him. Only, he asked for specialized treatment tailored to this new generation of synthetic drugs. None agreed to modify their standard treatment programs, he said.
So, he decided to go it alone.
He plumbed online forums and consulted with a vanguard of drug users who were convinced that conventional treatment is no longer enough to combat the roster of increasingly potent, and often polluted, synthetics.
By their logic, the world of treatment has not kept pace with the realities of the street. New drugs come, each more deadly than the last, yet the approach to addiction has barely changed in more than 50 years, they say.
Hapkomah’ solution? To devise a medical regimen himself.
He selected a cocktail of five drugs that he hoped would help him detox, including a highly potent opioid, a few common medications and a benzodiazepine to help manage anxiety and seizures.
And it seemed to work — until he suddenly vanished.
He stopped answering my messages.
The First Fix
It was not the first time that Hapkomah abruptly disappeared from public view.
He started using fentanyl in 2010, long before many Americans had even heard of the drug. As a teen, he and his friends would drive to an old Soviet housing bloc in the capital, Tallinn, where addicts and prostitutes congregated in amber-lit alleys.
They laughed at the users and johns who dipped behind buildings and then re-emerged, posture slackened.
“We thought it was funny and crazy, these zombies and these prostitutes,” he said. “The paradox was that, years later, we became them.”
One night, Hapkomah called over one of the prostitutes and asked her to score them some fentanyl. He snorted some in the back seat. Everything seemed to click into place for him, a euphoric present and its future promise.
“I felt like it fixed me,” he said.
Fentanyl was more than a high; it was a passport.
“That moment changed everything,” he said.
In the years since, he has cycled through hopeless addiction, rehab and college, maintaining a keen and curious mind, despite injecting what he conservatively estimates to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in synthetic opioids.
His account was pieced together through months of interviews, both in person and over encrypted messages and calls. Key dates and details were confirmed with rehab clinicians, government officials and harm-reduction specialists who know him, as well as his friends.
Hapkomah has spent as much of his adult life inside of Estonia’s underworld as he has outside of it, yet he didn’t grow up poor or marginalized. His parents loved him, he says, even if they fought bitterly over his drug use. He just liked getting high and by 17 had drunk alcohol, smoked weed, snorted coke and popped amphetamines.
“Basically, anything I could get my hands on,” he said.
But after that night in 2010, when he was barely old enough to buy a beer, fentanyl pushed out everything else.
By 2014, deep in the throes of addiction, he began his blog. Two years later, having taken the admittedly small world of Estonian publishing by storm, he landed a book deal. Though he remained anonymous, his book was a best seller: “How I became HAPKOMAH.”
He promoted his work online and became an activist of sorts, sounding a rallying cry from the streets while pillorying the government for what he considered its punitive approach to addiction.
And then he went offline.
As public awareness grew, so did his profile, and paranoia. He started to worry he might be targeted by the authorities. He stepped away from the limelight — and decided to get sober.
A Stint in Rehab
Hapkomah went to rehab at Viljandi Hospital, the nation’s main detox clinic, and spent five months kicking his synthetic opioid addiction. It was brutal, but it worked.
When he got out, he told himself he would re-enroll in college, get his life together. He was smart, could write, had a depth of experience and a sense of purpose.
But the real world subsumed his plans, he said, and the small failures of daily life mounted and overwhelmed them.
Not long after getting clean, in early 2021, he was using again. The staff at Viljandi knew — not because he told them, but because a small theater troupe in town had decided to stage a play based on his book.
They had invited him to opening night, which he attended. But the staff could tell he was high. No one said anything. Relapse was expected, if disappointing. Hapkomah stood around, glassy eyed, then left during the intermission.
By that time, Estonia had largely beaten back its fentanyl crisis, but nitazenes were on the loose. Soon enough, the onslaught of mysterious new drugs came.
Even methadone, the opioid substitute long used to ease users’ cravings, wasn’t helping with these new drugs, he said. Word also spread on the street that naloxone, a medicine that quickly reverses opioid overdoses, wasn’t working either.
“It was the moment I understood that someone needs to ring the alarm,” said Mart Kalvet, an addiction specialist helping Hapkomah.
Mr. Kalvet began to triangulate between a network of users and government officials, hoping to figure out what, exactly, was polluting the drug supply. Hapkomah began to suspect that he was taking medetomidine, a powerful animal tranquilizer found in American cities like Philadelphia, but still relatively unknown in Europe.
In March of 2025, Mr. Kalvet confirmed medetomidine in samples collected by the Estonian Forensic Sciences Institute. Traffickers were polluting synthetics with medetomidine to prolong the vanishingly short highs.
“It extends the high but enslaves the user,” Hapkomah explained.
It was months later that Hapkomah took rehab into his own hands, trying to get clean with the dangerous cocktail of drugs he prescribed himself — before vanishing for almost an entire year.
In his absence, the drug market continued to evolve. Before long, a new threat emerged: cychlorphine, a synthetic opioid 10 times as potent as fentanyl.
But it wasn’t new for Hapkomah. He was certain it was the drug that had destroyed one of his veins, terrifying him. Back then, few had heard of it. Now, it is one of the deadliest drugs in Estonia.
The half-life of new drugs is itself halving. Fentanyl was around for 15 years, and nitazenes barely seven. Who knew how long cychlorphine would be around before, it, too, was replaced with something just as, or even more, pernicious?
I searched for Hapkomah for months, messaging him, calling, reaching out to Mr. Kalvet and other friends. None of them had heard from him.
A few weeks ago, he finally responded.
He is OK, he says, still clean, staying off the phone — and away from his old life. He said he had just celebrated one year of sobriety.
The post How a Self-Described ‘Junkie’ Rode Synthetic Drugs to Oblivion — and Fame appeared first on New York Times.
