How a Self-Described ‘Junkie’ Rode Synthetic Drugs to Oblivion — and Fame

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.