Introduction
It was 2023. I was the youngest cop on the force at Midtown Heights P.D. So young, in fact, that I graduated from Midtown Heights Law Enforcement Academy two years before I was allowed to officially be a police officer. How did I manage that? Well, it helps when your father is the police chief. And your mom is the D.A. And your uncle is also a police officer. All three of those relationships come with benefits.
Officially becoming a police officer was my 21st birthday present. After a rushed induction, I did two months on patrol before I was promoted to narcotics. As it happened, I had a gift for sniffing out drugs, literally. I can smell things most people can’t. I can be in the driveway of a house, and immediately know what drugs are being stored, used, or dealt inside. When I was assigned to what I still consider the most important mission of my life, I already had over 200 narcotics arrests under my belt with 188 convictions. 94%. Not bad for a cop who most of his coworkers still considered a rookie.
You wouldn’t think narcotics would be a big problem in Midtown Heights, an otherwise peaceful, wealthy suburb of Madison, Wisconsin. Our poverty rate is less that 0.2%, our population is homogenous as can be, 89% of our population regularly attends church, and 45% of our adult population are military, ex military, or first responders. It’s the kind of place where teens still hang out at malt shops and malls, and nobody cares to ask why or tell them to leave. 78% of our youth are enrolled in sports, music, and/or the Boy or Girl Scouts. There’s hardly anyone in our juvie hall, and most people who do end up there don’t come back for another stay thanks to aggressive rehabilitation programs. Usually, when narcotics is called around here, it’s because teens were caught in public with misdemeanor amounts of cigarettes or weed, and virtually none of them ever see the inside of a cell. Every now and then a neighbor suspects their neighbor is running a trap house, and as I said I can tell before I even enter the home what to expect.
But in 2022, we suddenly saw healthy young athletes, mostly 5th to 10th grades, dropping dead everywhere from bathrooms to school football fields. While no school was immune, nearly all of the cases were taking place at Midtown Heights Junior High, which handled 6th-8th grades. Before anyone knew it, the otherwise peaceful school was overrun with drug dogs, school resource officers, and even FBI agents. But no one was able to locate the drug that caused the sudden deaths.
As it turned out, the drug in question was known locally as “Go Fast”, a colorless, odorless (even to me), tasteless, clear beverage that under normal circumstances was indistinguishable from water. It’s a completely harmless drink you can find at Dollar General legally, despite the fact that it makes even grown adults a little bit hyper and overexcited. Even if you drank a whole bottle of it, you wouldn’t be harmed and would gain massive improvements to athletic performance and even academic performance. That is, until a local cartel operative discovered that mixing it with less than a milliliter of brake fluid created the ultimate in performance-enhancing drugs, known locally as “Blue Fast.” People who drank it, especially young people, went from couch potatoes to running cross-country after a single drink.
The problem was, regardless of how you’d reacted to it before, the 3rd time could kill you. Or the 45th time. Or the 1000th time. There was literally no way to tell who would suddenly drop dead of instant, unsolvable cardiac arrest, or when. Even school athlete drug tests couldn’t detect it. One night that will forever go down in history as Heartless Wednesday, an entire 5th grade Little League team dropped dead while playing against Madison’s Little League team. A bottle of blue liquid was discovered on a bench in the locker room, and the panic was underway.
There’s only one way to determine if a clear or blue liquid is Go Fast or Blue Fast: sending it to a special division of the FBI in Quantico that tests only for that. Sadly, nearly everyone who used Blue Fast would be found out only when they dropped dead. Failing that, schools went so far as banning students from possessing non-bottled water or sodas like Blue Fanta, and some banned outside drinks altogether. That lasted about a month, until the county government told us that banning high school athletes from possessing water or soda was too draconian. There was talk of banning Go Fast altogether or prohibiting its sale to kids, but the company successfully argued in court that they shouldn’t be penalized for selling an energy drink used by hundreds of millions of people every day, harmlessly so. The state then passed a law saying that you couldn’t buy brake fluid unless you could prove you were over 16 and owned a car, which helped lower the number of deaths significantly, at least until Blue Fast gained a cult following among adult drug users as well and they started selling it to kids.
So the deaths continued. By February of 2023, 60 kids had dropped dead at Midtown Heights Junior High alone from drinking Blue Fast. It was then that I got an idea for how to do something about it.
