Unless they have prescription-grade ingredient mixers and carefully test the results, it’s going to be easy to have a batch where the fentynal is more in some parts and less than others. To save costs, the drug dealers may be doing the mixing with more improvised methods, such as putting the ingredients in a jug and shaking it up. It could be that most of the time things are okay, but sometimes the improvised mixing process is not sufficient. Losing a few customers to a toxic dose may just be considered the cost of business to them.
As I mentioned earlier I have been on multiple calls where someone thought they were doing coke but OD’d on fentanyl. Specifically I either administered narcan or directed others to administer narcan. It certainly isn’t an urban legend. The below is a well documented case. An on duty Newark fire captain died of an OD. A retired friend came by with some coke and they both OD’d. In the article it mentions the autopsy revealed cocaine and fentanyl in his blood.
I know they do, my question is why.
Tell that to the person I know that OD’d on coke cut with fentanyl.
The word is FENTANYL.
It is pronounced FENTANYL.
Not fen-tin-all, despite what small-town sheriffs and morons named JD Vance call it, which should tell you a lot right there.
That’s true, and the media’s glamorization of opiate abuse in the meantime hasn’t helped matters.
Think I’m kidding? Remember this next time you see an attractive young white person interviewed, where they say, “Oh, yeah, I became an addict because of the 10 Percocets I was given after having my wisdom teeth pulled, and now I’m clean and my life is so wonderful now!” and after they die a year or two later from an overdose, their family reveals that they were higher than a kite when they gave that interview.
Oh, very true! And the overprescription of opioids continues to this day. I have many locked in a safe including a bunch I was given when I had my last two wisdom teeth pulled a couple years ago. I did have one surgery where I really needed nearly the amount I was given and I was so afraid that I had a log where I kept track of my ingestion of them.
My wife was ran over by a car and was in the hospital for two weeks, then in recovery for a few more weeks. In recovery, I had to force them to reduce her levels of pain meds because she was so out of it that she couldn’t stay awake for any of her recovery OT/PT/ST. They resisted me so much and said over and over they had to keep ahead of the pain (they really just wanted to keep her out of it since it is less work). I had to get the physiatrist involved. I wonder how many people come out of something like that addicted?
A kilo of cocaine or heroin is about $25,000 wholesale. A recreational dosage of heroin or cocaine is maybe 10-30mg.
Meanwhile a kilo of fentanyl is something like $2,000 and a recreational dose is 200mcg. So a kilo of fentanyl has enough for 5 million doses. Meaning a dose of fentanyl is virtually free and roughly a thousand times cheaper than a recreational dose of heroin or cocaine.
Obviously most dealers do not buy pure drugs by the kilo, but you get the point. A recreational dosage of fentanyl is 1000x cheaper than other major narcotics
So you buy a kilo of fentanyl, put a small amount with some filler and sell it as heroin, xanax, cocaine, etc. It may not have the same effect as those drugs, but it has an effect. You may sell it for $5 or $10 a dose, but it cost you a thousandth of a penny to make.
Over time the economics adds up.
Its unrelated, but opioids are actually underprescribed now. People are getting ibuprofen for serious injuries nowadays. People with serious chronic pain disorders who managed them well with a low dose of opioids are getting their medications taken away and their quality of life and ability to function declines dramatically.
If anything, underprescribing pharmaceutical opioids for pain may be contributing to death from fentanyl because people are forced to go into the streets to get pain meds because their doctor cut them off.
The real solution is dramatic investment in R&D to invent newer and better ways to manage chronic pain so people aren’t as reliant on opioids and can control their pain with other technologies. But we are a far way away from that.
I fixed the typo in the thread title.
My experiences with prescriptions is from 2019/20 for both me and my wife. Glad to hear things have swung the other way, but I hope they can find a better middle ground.
I would be interested to see studies about people getting hooked due to untreated pain vs other things. I did very unwise things when I was young and it wasn’t due to physical pain (brain issues - yes). Luckily I never got addicted to the worst of them even though the nicotine and alcohol were bad enough.
This is why. It’s actually very hard to evenly mix a tiny tiny quantity of something into a lot of something else. Drug dealers don’t want to kill their customers, but they probably don’t care a ton if they lose a few here and there.
People who come out addicted are going to find a way regardless, whether it’s to opiates or something else. Most people who take opiates, regardless of why, may have some withdrawal symptoms if they aren’t tapered rapidly enough, but they have no desire to stay on the meds when the pain is relieved.
This whole “candy dish” thing is nothing new. The earliest reference I’ve seen to it was in the 1960s, and I remember a woman I worked with (thankfully, at a restaurant, not a pharmacy) who had some dental work and just took a few of the tablets she was prescribed, and I overheard her saying that she was going to keep them and take them to the next party.
(headdesk)
The story gets better.
I looked her up recently, and found out that she is a PHYSICIAN’S ASSISTANT, probably a second-career degree. That blew my mind.
I have heard in interviews with dealers, etc, that overdose deaths are advertising. It proves that you’re selling the good stuff.
ETA: not meaning that they cause ODs on purpose, but they don’t work very hard to avoid it, because other than legal, moral, and (if they believe) spiritual problems, there isn’t a downside to having a customer OD.
I’ve heard that too, but I didn’t know if that was still the case with fentanyl.
When people were buying heroin it was a selling point. It meant you were selling high purity stuff while the guy down the street was selling heroin that was only 5% pure.
But with fentanyl and the lethal dose only being 2mg, I don’t know if death by OD of fentanyl is the same selling point as it was with selling heroin that was highly stepped on and cut.
Standards have certainly fallen: “I mean, it’s like selling anything… as long as you don’t take a piss, people will always come back for more.”
Stranger
A new type of pain medication was approved by the FDA earlier this month. There does seem to be some disagreement whether this will work for long-term chronic pain.
Interesting. They finally got a drug that works on the NaV1.7 and NaV1.8 sodium channels to the marketplace.
This drug only works on the NaV1.8 channels though. Supposedly the 1.7 channels are even more potent, hopefully they have drugs that block those channels too.
Another key point here is that even before the advent of fentanyl it’s not like the drug cartels (who are the only ones in the game right now, after decades of the the war on drugs, huge criminal syndicates who have no problem with accidental death or murder) were providing safe unadulterated drugs. Street drugs have always been cut with all sorts of crap and did not contain just the drug it purports to be, and always stood a chance killing the customer because of that.
It’s simple maths. You can make $1000 dollars profit with a 1-in-1000 chance of killing the end user, or $5000 dollars profit with 1-in-100 chance. The kinds of people who might say “hmmm maybe that’s not good idea” have long sided stopped being involved in the drug market at these levels.
The difference between 1-in-1000 chance of the user dying and 1-in-100 (or whatever the number is) is not enough to actually reduce the number of customers
One article I recall mentioned that also fentanyl grains were fairly hard and dificult to crush - hence the risk that trying to dilute it with filler or other street drugs, if not done with care (ha ha) would occasionally result in a lethal larger lump in one of the doses.
As for adulteration, nothing new - I read once about the good old days before the FDA. Along with highly unsanitary conditions, adulteration was a problem. One item mentioned was that unscrupulous tavern owners would water down alcohol and then mix with nux vomica (?) since whether someone tossed their cookies (round trip meal ticket, techinicolor yawn, etc.) was one way patrons gauged whether their drink was as strong as advertised.
Bingo!
So what if you kill off a few of your customers; there are plenty more to take their place, as long as the money’s green.