Oh, I’m sure that can be done and given safely to patients in a controlled medical setting, but there’s no real advantage to it, since fentanyl and other opioids do the job equally well. But the problem arises when the legit stuff gets diverted into the addict arena where they won’t draw up precise doses, they’ll snort or IV whatever much THEY think will get them high enough, and more of them will end up dead. Even more than with fentanyl, potentially.
At least that’s what I conclude, based on past readings of the FDA and DEA papers on whys and wherefores of Schedule I & II drug regulation
It seems that avoiding error in preparing pharmaceutical dilutions isn’t all that simple.
The margin for error also diminishes considerably when dealing with a far more powerful drug.
One wonders just how accurate homeopathic dilutions are. Though the practical import of screwing up is probably nil (“Did I let a single molecule of “active” substance slip into the final product? Oh nooooooooo!”)
*I’m guessing that mouth pipetting is not a good idea when preparing a solution of carfentanil.
Assuming you could even get the real thing in the first place, you would probably die, unless you got only the microscopic dose that would work for a person.
It’s a large animal tranquilizer, used mainly for megafauna like elephants and hippos, and is only available under very limited protocols, at least here in the States. I’m very aware that it’s shown up on the American black market.
30+ years ago when I was in pharmacy school, it was mentioned just so we would know it existed. I never heard of it again until the past few years.
I’m curious. Given the ridiculous potency, where even a large animal felling dose is units of milligrams, why not just use fentanyl to drop a beast? The potency of carfentanil would seem to be unnecessary, and just causes grief. It seems to be a drug with no useful justification or purpose.
Perhaps the difficulty in handling is a deterrent to someone trying to divert those animal doses to nefarious channels. The manner in which fentanyl has become such a serious problem is not to be taken lightly. But as noted above, the drug trade is not something known for its duty of care.
My understanding is that fentanyl is used in surgery because it is both fast to act and also fast to be cleared out of the body. This makes it a good fit for use in surgery, where you want to prep the patient quickly and you also want the patient to recover quickly. But that “quick recovery” might not be ideal for handling megafauna. I didn’t know what the dynamics are of carfentanyl, but it’s a different drug, they may be different from those of fentanyl.
The problem of course being the rather fine line between a prompt knockout dose and a fatal dose.
A little thought would readily suggest that any sort of dispersal munition deployed in a large single-room building would be the opposite of uniform minimum effective dosing.
Instead some people, hostage or terrorist, got 20x lethal doses and others got nothing. Which left the unaffected terrorists free to a) slaughter the remaining hostages, and b) fight effectively against the assaulting police troops.
As Patton said of a different battle, “It was a shambles.”
The thinking of using a very strong and fast acting material to prevent the bad guys from enacting a suicide pact w the hostages makes a lot of sense as a tactical idea.
The problem is in the implementation, where the fantasy of even effective dosing crashes into the ugly reality of how dispersing munitions really work.