The USA Potato

2026-01-03 08:01:00

The Black Market for a Lifesaving Cat Drug

In 2023, Marlena Arjo adopted a one-eyed kitten with a penchant for destruction. She named him Otto, and over the next eight months, Otto grew into his own little chaotic personality.

“ He’s laying on houseplants, he’s tearing books out of the bookshelves, ripping the calendar off the wall…I wasn’t prepared for having a criminal in my home,” Arjo joked.

Within months, Otto got sick and stopped eating. Arjo rushed him to a vet and learned he had feline infectious peritonitis, better known as FIP, a disease that kills nearly all cats that contract it.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

The vet said there was nothing the clinic could do. But there was something Arjo could do.

“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Arjo recalled the vet telling her. “But by the way, you can get drugs for this if you go to this Facebook group.”

This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Hyperfixed podcast, we tell the story of the cat drug black market, why it was even necessary, and how cat lovers fought for big changes to make the black market obsolete.

---

This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.

Hyperfixed | HYPERFIXED

Alex Goldman's new podcast, Hyperfixed, gets to the bottom of life's most intractable and annoying problems and has fun along the way..

^{www.hyperfixedpod.com}