So five people were at a party. They thought they were doing cocaine, but it was really fentanyl. All five died almost immediately.
Nothing much to add; I did not know that was quite possible. Yikes.
I edited the title to make it more descriptive.
““No drug is safe,” Mason said. “Because any drug could literally have fentanyl in it without the user knowing. We’re finding it in cocaine, we’re finding it in heroin, we’re finding it meth.”
Cocaine, heroin, meth, etc are unsafe drugs even without the fentanyl.
A while back I was meeting up with some college friends and commented that ‘back in our day’, if you wanted some coke or pills or acid or ecstasy or whatever, you just asked around, found someone that was selling it, gave them some money, got your drugs and went on with your day. Nowadays you really do run the risk of thinking you’re buying coke or pills or whatever and you might OD on fentanyl an hour later.
You can buy fentanyl test kits online specifically for testing street drugs (DanceSafe.org).
I thought that cocaine was relatively safe (absent heart problems?). And your average heroin/meth user probably knows their safe dose, so adding fentanyl in secret is jacking up risk factor.
Actually, since it presumably increases the dealer’s costs, why are they doing it? Killing off your clientele doesn’t seem a good long term business plan either.
I believe you can sell any powder laced with fentanyl and claim it is whatever you want. Fentalnyl is cheap and easy to smuggle, because so little is needed. It is 50-100 times more powerful than morphine!
0.25 mg can be deadly!
Why dealers sell fentanyl as cocaine I don’t understand, the effect is the opposite. I guess (some) dealers are ignorant and hope the clients are not going to complain: high is high. Or dead, they don’t complain either.
Read the same story three weeks ago happening in Buenos Aires. And many other places, it seems, after a quick search. I hope some idiot does not start lacing dope with it, they did poison a lot of people with some “space grass” (may have been called something different) in London: it had nothing to do with cannabis.
well, “safe” as in “not immediately deadly”, maybe. All those drugs tend to mess up their users.
I think the idea is that you can take something inert, add some fentanyl and sell it as something better. The thing about fentanyl is that it’s so cheap, you’re not really jacking up your cost by that much and IIRC carfentanil is even cheaper.
Just a very quick glance at the first thing I found said that $1000 worth of fentanyl can bring back $160k if it’s sold as heroin. (Cite).
Now, it makes sense to add it to other opiates. Even benzos I can understand. But cocaine always seemed odd. Opiates and coke have such different highs, I think most people would realize something is off. Imagine if you grabbed a cup of coffee when you got to work but didn’t realize I added a bunch of benadryl to it. You’re going to know something’s wrong and if it happens more than once, you’ll probably stop getting your coffee from there.
Back in the day, the issue was that things were cut too much. Everyone that touched it between the manufacturer and street dealer would cut it with something. But it was mostly inert stuff. I think the issue nowadays isn’t the street dealers, it’s the bigger people, higher up the chain. Whoever’s cut the coke with fentanyl and killed 5 people is likely a big enough dealer that it’s not going to hurt their sales. What they should, however, be nervous about is the likelihood of the victim’s dealers, and their dealers, and the dealers above them ratting out who they bought the laced stuff from until the police/FBI pin 5 deaths on the person that did it.
Cocaine kills about 20,000 people a year, more than any drug except meth and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
A big problem is that it is by no means trivial to mix two powders: ask any pharmacist. If 0.25 milligram can be deadly, your fentanyl grains cannot be coarser than this, or at least one dose is deadly. And if you mix the fentanyl in such a way that two grains of it, both under 0.25 mg, but together above, end up in the same dose, this dose is going to be deadly too. And even if you mix it perfectly, but during transport the stuff sorts itself out (see granular convection or Brazil nut effect) some bits become deadly again.
And ignorance is nobody’s fault, never.
That chart is puzzling. Why would cocaine & meth fatalities have increased by around 5-fold since 2015?
The concurrence with the explosive increase in fentanyl deaths makes it look to me as though most of the cocaine and meth fatalities were probably misattributed, also caused by fentanyl.
Maybe just more people using them?
I noticed that too. In fact, to add to it, what I noticed is that when fentanyl deaths took off, around 2016, heroin and prescription opiates went down. However, I wasn’t thinking the deaths were misattributed but rather people that were regular users of those drugs, people that would have eventually OD’d on their drug of choice, accidentally OD’d on fentanyl first.
The dealer may not have intended to add fentanyl to cocaine. It may have been a mistake or contamination from the container previously used to mix together other drugs. Drug dealer labs aren’t exactly known for their adherence to ISO9000 quality control standards.
Some documentary about drug dealers showed them mixing up drugs by pouring the powders in a gallon milk jug and then shaking it around. Even if they got the ratios correct in the jug, chances are the drugs aren’t going to be uniformly distributed. The ratios of each drug in the packaged product may vary wildly.
Why a 5-fold increase since 2015?
About half of that increase is attributed to the pandemic. You can see a large spike in all drug deaths from 2019 to 2020. It looks like the remainder of the increase is simply due to a recent trend among drug dealers for cutting products with fentanyl.
That was my original speculation - that the apparent sharp increase in cocaine and meth overdose coincident with a huge increase in fentanyl overdose is misattribution - it’s all fentanyl.
Not to imply that taking cocaine is safe, of course - since those numbers presumably reflect actual outcomes from people taking what they believe to be cocaine.
Could it also be possible that if the Medical Examiner found both fentanyl and another drug in their system, they’d report them both as the cause of death instead of working out whether it was one or the other? That would/could allow for fentanyl numbers to spike white dragging the other numbers up with it.
Similarly, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were people that died due to ODing on fentanyl but for whatever reason it’s not tested for (ie, medical examiner thinks it’s something else and doesn’t test for fentanyl). Though I’d assume at this point, every person that’s brought in where it’s even possible they died due to an OD, would be tested for fentanyl. Especially since higher numbers can probably get local governments some federal money to help fight the problem.
(ETA, I suppose this is just a different way of saying what you said, namely that fentanyl is killing people but other drugs are taking the blame)
What’s it like to die of fentanyl OD? Does it appear to be a gentle, painless, easy way to go?
Six survived in Florida. Once you see one case, you see others.