. I recently had an old friend die from a fentanyl overdose. Having retired from the food industry an also an avid baker it got me wondering about the process these illegal drug manufacturers use to lace their drugs with fentanyl. It seems mixing powders and stirring them would be somewhat happenstance. Do they dissolve these drugs into liquids to blend them? What is the process used?
This certainly happens, and leads to batches of drugs where the last few doses are a death sentence, as the fentanyl sinks to the bottom due to different size/weight of grains.
I temporarily closed the thread and moved it to IMHO from The Café.
Please be very careful not stray into discussion of illegal activity.
One of us would have to disappear such posts.
That is exactly what I was wondering about, if the grain structure and density would affect it’s ability to be mixed properly… I may have used a bad example only because the accuracy is so critical with drugs. My actual thoughts are more about how matter was distributed during the big bang. I was trying to think in terms of fine powders in an attempt to better comprehend the big bang.
Sorry about that, I was mainly just using fentanyl as an example, my real interest here is blending fine powders.
OK, here we go - decades in the pharma industry, 13 years hands on in labs and pilot areas, powder mixing a speciality.
First, things will generally mix better if they are (a) fine powders, and (b) similar sizes, so the first step is to suitably mill powders. But you can still run into difficulties if you are dealing with a cohesive powder which can form clumps. There are ways around that - you can use a more active mixing (a bladed mixer like a big Kenwood chef) rather than, say, a tumbling cube mixer (pretty much what it sounds like). Or for some applications (I’m thinking tablets or capsules) you could add eg fumed silica which has an enormous surface area, sufficient to coat your active substances enough to limit their cohesiveness (prevent caking).
If you are mixing a lot of powder A with a little of powder B, what you don’t do is toss 20 g of B into 20kg of A. You start off by mixing similar amounts (premixing) and then “mix up”. For example, you might need to mix your premix with a kilo of A to produce a second premix (more dilute, larger volume), and them add this to the residue of A. Or maybe, if there is a huge disparity in amounts, yet a further premix may be required before the final mixing step.
Commonly more than one type of mixing is used. You might prepare a premix in a bladed mixer and do your final mix in a tumbling cube. A tumbling cube has advantages for large scale mixing - it’s enclosed, it uses less energy than an equivalent bladed mixer, and it can be used as a holding vessel.
You can mix by adding a solution to a powder - it’s sometimes done for extreme dilutions - but it has its own set of problems (it makes your carrier wet, can cause clumping, requiring further processing etc.)
That’s a starter for you - probably enough to go on with?
j
Ages ago I had a girlfriend who studied pharmacy and she told me they had a Seminar (that is a whole course over a semester) solely dedicated to mixing things. What you write, specially this
reminds me of some of the things she told me back then. Unfortunately, it seems, drug dealers who want to stretch their stuff are not aware of such basic procedures. They probably don’t care. I am afraid they would not use fumed silica even if they knew what it was.
I am not the addressee, but I could read about such stuff for hours on end. Thanks a lot for this brief introduction!
Thank you very much that was an excellent answer I especially like to park where you talked about premixing with smaller amounts that made a lot of sense
My pleasure, both.
I wondered if my explanation of a tumbling cube made enough sense, so here’s a video I found. At 52 seconds, I reckon it’s still about 50 seconds too long - you’ll get the idea real quick. This looks to be smallish pilot scale - industrial is much bigger (of the order of tons) and rotates much more slowly (15 rpm, say).
j
Some drug dealers will have actual pharmaceutical mixers, but other dealers will just use anything, such as putting the drugs and cutting ingredients in a milk jug and shaking it around. It just depends on the dealer. There’s not a professional set of standards they have to adhere to.
One problem with illegal supply chains is that the end consumer has to rely on the actions of a bunch of people who don’t care about the law. Some may actually care about their customers, and may be competent with or without formal training, but there’s no regulatory protection and no licensing to enforce any particular level of knowledge. .
This is disappointing. I enjoy imagining a drug dealer with their certifications framed on the wall like a PMP or an MSCE.
This terrifying image shows lethal doses of three opioids and demonstrates how even well blended compounds can cause, statistically, an overdose.
The discussion of bladed blenders and industrial-size tumbling cubes is fascinating, and helps me understand how the big bang worked. 
this reminds me of why “molly” is so dangerous according to the nat geo “drugs inc” episode on it … it’s supposed to have such a painstaking exact measurement that there’s only a handful of people trained with the ability to get it correct so something like 99.5 percent of what’s sold on the street is made incorrectly to various degrees and it has different effects depending on the mix which is one of the reasons it’s so dangerous…
Of course, to the users, that’s part of the fun…
I would almost think it would be prefable to liquify all the powders and blend to an equal solution, then re-dehydrating it back to a powder. Or fill it into capsules in layers in the correct amount per dose.
See, this is why I don’t deal drugs, too much like actual work.
But then again, I like the teeny tiny size of my fake claritin and my colchicine, I would be perfectly fine with all my drugs minimalizing the nonmedical ingredients so I get the smallest pill possible, if I were rich, I would go to a compounding pharmacy and have all my med customized into just a couple capsules per dose period [I take the most of my meds at 0500 in the morning, anything other than the omeprazole and the tamoxifen. I have some that are 12 hour meds and some that are 8 hour meds, so I take meds at 0500, 1300, 1700 and 2100]