the drug that exceeds the recreational categories — "It is also now the hardest…"
It is also now the hardest recreational compound to acquire in North America after raw Vietnamese opium, which forget it.
Context
The drug defined entirely by an ominousness that outruns pleasure: it broke its own accidental discoverer into retirement and wall-watching, carries a reputation as the grimmest thing ever made, and is nearly unobtainable. "Recreational" is the wrong word for a compound whose defining anecdotes are all catastrophe — the appetite here has left the category of fun and entered something closer to daring the abyss.