Why add Fentanyl to cocaine? (mild TV spoilers)

Factual Questions
1

I haven’t used cocaine since the 80s and have never used recreational opiates, so everything I know about the economics of their distribution and usage comes from TV and movies.

In American Rust on Showtime, a dealer is mixing Fentanyl with cocaine and selling it as coke. A high school athlete takes one snort and drops dead, and others are hospitalized.

Why would a dealer do this? When I bought coke in the 80s, we expected it to be laced with cheap speed or cheaper non-drugs, because dealers could then sell more product from the same investment. Why would dealers add a completely different, also-expensive drug that risks killing their customers?

Please help fight my ignorance!

2

In many cases, fentanyl is the cheaper drug particularly black market knockoffs.

Because of its potency and low cost, drug dealers have been mixing fentanyl with other drugs including heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine, increasing the likelihood of a fatal interaction.

3

I don’t have an answer, but coincidentally, I was just watching the local evening news yesterday and they were warning about Mexican cartels mixing meth with fentanyl and forming it into pills that look convincingly like real Adderall and other pharma drugs. Apparently they are currently in wide distribution in the Detroit area. I also wondered why they would mix fentanyl, a synth opiate, with an upper like meth.

I did a quick search to see if there was an easy answer- I asked ‘why mix meth and fentanyl’, not coke. Most search results were just warnings that it was happening, but this article addresses the why of it, though speculatively. The’ tl;dr’ gist is that apparently using meth over several days in a row causes the body pain and discomfort, and the fentanyl alleviates that, allowing the user to use it more often. I have no idea if that’s the actual case or not.

4

That confuses me, too. If I’m buying coke, I want a world-conquering boost, not … whatever Fentanyl delivers. (I’m assuming as an opiate it’s a numbing or a “downer” sensation, but again I have no clue.) But then again I know people used to combine cocaine and heroin, so maybe “fentylcaine” is awesome.

5

It is happening in real life. This was not even two months ago.

6

You’d think the smart thing to do would be to go with something cheap but inert, so that you don’t risk being known as the seller who kills their customers.

7

Fentanyl is cheaper than Mannitol?

8

Exactly my thought. Plus that way you only have to secure one illicit substance, not two.

9

Precisely, which is why the combination is probably intended by the user. A “speedball” is a term for a combination of cocaine and heroin - IIRC, it is what was suspected to have killed John Belushi. Fentanyl, as I understand it (I haven’t tried either it or heroin) has a similar effect as heroin. And even if drugs might seem antagonistic, users will experiment with different combinations in search of a synergistic effect. So it’s an attempt to get higher than either drug, alone, would produce.

(Anecdotally, I have combined smoking cannabis and cocaine, and thought that both contributed to the numbing feeling that I experienced. Cannabis also relaxed my racing heart. For the record, this was dangerous behavior that I am not endorsing)

ETA: re-reading the OP, I see that it’s referring to a show where cocaine was secretly laced with Fetanyl, and caused an accidental death. Yeah, I don’t see why a dealer would do that and not tell the customer if it leads to dead clients.

10

Hey solost!

(1) Just as you read from the article, I speculate at least one reason why fentanyl makes its way into meth is to assuage the aches and pains that come with staying up for several days without sleep (and while otherwise abusing the body, or at least not treating it right).

(2) Another reason — manufacturers, distributors, and dealers make mistakes. They could, for example, use the same equipment to powder, adulterate, and re-rock heroin as they do meth (u don’t “re-rock” meth, I know… u’d “recrystallize” it) or coke.

With that being said, fentanyl offers little euphoria. It DOES NOT offer that classic opioid high like heroin, pain pills — for those who don’t know, heroin LITERALLY does the same thing and acts the same way as moderate-to-strong opioid painkillers (hydromorphone, oxymorphone, oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine) EXCEPT for the fact it’s unregulated and, in much of the Eastern/Southern U.S. nowadays, it’s not even being sold anymore… it’s just fentanyl :^( — and, besides, the threshold between (1) an effective dose and (2) a deadly dose is very small! Much smaller than with other, classic opioids. Many stimulant users just use stimulants; with little to no opioid tolerance, just a few salt grains’ worth of fentanyl can kill.

As such, it doesn’t make sense why fentanyl makes its way into meth or coke. It’s not to produce the “speedball” feeling because FENTANYL FUCKING SUCKS in terms of euphoria and “feel good” value.

(3) My last hypothesis to explain why fentanyl makes its way into some batches of coke/meth is to “take the edge off” of meth/coke high — the unwanted effects that sometimes accompany stimulant drugs.

(4) Okay, okay, ONE last hypothesis… In closing, most of y’all have seen this article, right? “China Finds Restaurants Using Opium Poppies in Food,” ostensibly to make addicts out of customers lmao. Fentanyl could be added to illicit stimulants in hopes of addicting stim users. But I doubt that. However, the fact that meth/coke don’t produce true dependence and, in their absence, the hellish withdrawals that opioids produce — fentanyl WD is WAY worse, WAY WAY worse than any classic opioid’s WD symptoms — kinda gives credence to this idea. “Oh, you go to another supplier? Haha, you’re dopesick now. Come back to papa,” a dealer might think.

Hope these insights — speculative, nonetheless — help some of you understand what’s going on in the modern illicit drug market. I leave you with this:

The problem isn’t evil cartels. It’s not greedy drug dealers. It’s the fact that drugs are criminalized and unregulated. When we regulate the illicit drug supply, we eliminate fentanyl’s presence in heroin, meth, coke, etc. Classic opioids (virtually any other opioids than fentanyl is what “classic opioids” means… and, no, “classic opioids” is not some medical or otherwise widely-used term) aren’t in any way as dangerous as fentanyl. Also, the real danger of overdose comes with combined drug intoxication. The now-standard inclusion of fentanyl/fentanyl analogues in illicit opioids (heroin) makes it THAT much more deadly thanks to combined drug intox. Anyways. PLEASE adopt pro-drug and pro-drug-user ideologies and share them with others if you want this fentanyl bullshit to stop. And it’s not even the fentanyl that’s the problem. It’s the fact that none of us know what the hell we’re putting in our bodies or, if we do know, we don’t know in what proportions, dosages, or amounts.

Kindly,

Daniel Garrett

Tennessee Harm Reduction

11

This makes sense to me. If I add some inert substance, I stretch my product but that’s about it. If I add Fentanyl but tell my clients, they might say no thanks. But if I add it and don’t tell them, I might get them addicted to my product alone. And if a couple of them die, well, omelets and eggs …

12

In the coke taking world that might be a bad thing. In the heroin taking world it’s a marketing tool.

13

From what I gather on Reddit, because fentanyl is so much more potent than heroin or morphine, dealers can order it in bulk from China and then dilute it with cheap inert filler.

Problem is, because it is so potent, it is hard to get the correct dosage, and with most dealers not being proper chemists, it’s easy to screw up and make a bad batch.

As for the resulting product killing their customers, I was surprised to learn, and I quote a couple of Redditors’ explanations verbatim,

14

I’ve posted it before but this photo is terrifying:

[Album] LETHAL DOSES OF HEROIN AND FENTANYL SIDE BY SIDE
15

Some discussion I recall when fentanyl and car-phentanyl(?) were first hitting the news, some expert mentioned that the reason so many people were dying from it was the potency and that it was difficult to crush properly - so mixing it with “filler” means that there might be too-large fragments of the active drug in some of the mixtures; someone would be fine using it until they took a bit with too big a chunk of pure fentanyl and OD’d.

Since I have no idea - when you say “a more expensive drug” are we saying a satisfactory dose costs more than a dose of cocaine, or that it is more expensive per gram? (Se picture posted above)

I remember too reading an article about adulterating products in the 1800’s before consumer protection laws. The article mentioned that some tavern owners would water down their drinks, but then mix in nux vomica so that patrons would think “this is potent stuff” because it induced vomiting in sufficient quantity, like strong liquor. Perhaps there’s a similar deceptive feeling with the mix, that it enhances the normal feeling of cocaine.

Or would it be because cocaine is at times hard to come by, but not fentanyl - yet some people just want coke?

16

[Moderating]
Welcome to the Straight Dope, @TNHarmReduction . It might not be obvious from the category descriptions, but we do not allow advocacy for issues in the General Questions category. Most of your post was good information appropriate for this category, but that last paragraph is problematic. If you’d like to advocate for repeal of drug laws, you’re welcome to do so in our Great Debates category.

17

I agree with the posters who said, “Why would a dealer want to kill off their customers?”

I heard about nurses being instructed to tell their patients that they will be getting Sublimaze, a brand name for fentanyl, so they won’t freak out.

18

It strikes me as a bit naive to assume that people addicted to a drug that can kill you will stop if they find out it’s mixed with another drug that can super-duper kill you. Especially with all the crazy drugs even non-addicts have been taking over this past year.

19

For really hardcore addicts, finding out that they can get drugs that can, as you put it, super-duper kill you is part of the excitement of the addiction process.

20

Fentanyl still has a narcotic effect. If they cut the drug with something inert the client does not get high and does not come back as a customer.

Fentanyl is SUPER potent and very dangerous. A little goes a long way so it is relatively cheap to put into drugs. They can use something inert and put that little bit in it and the user gets high.

Each of the vials below contains a lethal dose for an adult human: