Why is this happening? Is it just because some dealers figure since fentanyl is 50-100x more potent than morphine, they can just mix 10mg of fentanyl with 990mg of filler and sell it as a gram of heroin? Is that why the deaths keep happening? Or is fentanyl easier to get than heroin?
Where are people getting the fentanyl or carfentanil to lace heroin with?
I would guess it boils down to money. Very small amounts of fentanyl (a few micrograms) are required, which is why it is easy to overdose on fentanyl.
10mg (10000 micrograms) would cause respiratory arrest in most people.
I suspect fentanyl’s easier to manufacture these days than heroin is. IIUC, manufacturing fentanyl doesn’t require starting with an opiate precursor (such as morphine or codeine), while heroin does.
So you think people are manufacturing fentanyl, then cutting it with 99% filler and selling it as heroin?
Economically that would make sense, but wouldn’t that cause heroin prices to bottom out?
We really need drug decriminalization.
When I had my cardiac catheterization two years ago I was very excited about receiving fentanyl for the procedure. But when they gave it to me I felt nothing, and immediately raised concerns with the doctor.
He explained that it was a very small dose, and I wasn’t bothered by them cannulating my femoral vessel, so it did its job. They gave more about half way through the procedure, and other than making me talkative I felt nothing. 
Actually, I believe the therapeutic index (toxic dose divided by active dose) is larger for fentanyl than for most opioids, including heroin.
From reading the Wikipedia article, this is a bit of a misleading measure. The trouble is that the therapeutic index is a relative measure. The danger with fentanyl is that it’s so powerful that the absolute difference between an active dose and a toxic dose is tiny, making it very difficult to produce a safe recreational drug with the simple tools used by drug producers.
For medical uses the wide therapeutic index makes fentanyl very useful, as modern medical equipment is easily accurate enough to produce a safe dose.
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theory crackpot or anything … but seriously … once paid why would the pharmaceutical company care where the fentanyl ends up? Once all those railroad cars full cross into Mexico, it’s not their problem anymore.
I’m having trouble finding pricing information that isn’t ten years old. But if prescription opioids have become harder to obtain, that would push up demand for heroine and the like.
But yes any middling organic chemist can make fentanyl from precursors that have only recently been targeted. Whereas obtaining an appreciable amount of morphine requires a lot of land and labor.
Because the US government could put pressure on domestic and international suppliers to reduce the supply. Same way they did with Rx opioids in the US.
Visualization of a lethal dose of fentanyl vs heroin.
Terrifying.
Except that didn’t work so well controlling cocaine … or meth …
I understand what you’re saying, and in theory this should work to control the drug problem in the USA. Just remember, there’s a shooting war going on done in Mexico between the government and the drug cartels. There’s enough corrupt officials that whatever documents are needed get signed.
Short of US military invasion, like in Panama, there’s very little the US can do about the illegal drug trade in a foreign country.
Carfentanil is being used because you can buy it through the mail.
DON’T DO THAT!!!
I damned near reported you as a spammer.
ETA:
:eek:
The master speaks: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1195/why-are-cocaine-and-heroin-sometimes-cut-with-strychnine-or-arsenic
Yes, that’s not about fentanyl, but the answers in this thread ultimately, won’t be different: why? Because it can be, because it has some properties that make it indistinguishable, because it has some similar effect that hides that its cut, because (Walter White’s’s obsession in the episode “Fly” notwithstanding,) quality control just isn’t important for dangerous drugs.
Fentanyl isn’t used to “cut.” Cutting means diluting the product so it goes further. Fentanyl does the opposite. A small amount makes the product more potent. The fact that people die is a feature not a bug. Users seek out the products that are more powerful and one indications is how many overdoses there are.
I’ve been reading about heroin/fentanyl/opiate overdoses increasingly in my hometown newspaper for a few years. They say that fentanyl is cheaper per gram than heroin and each gram is something like 100x as potent. This led to dealers cutting in a little fentanyl with a tiny dose of heroin to stretch the heroin supplies, and then to using tiny amount of fentanyl with 99% filler to simulate a heroin dose. But street druggists can’t get the distribution of fentanyl perfect when they cut it. One part of the batch may be 99.8% filler and the customer gets only 20% of the intended dose. Another part of the same batch is 96% filler and one dose is four times as potent as intended.
Drug buyer gets the 20% intended dose from his dealer and it has little effect. The next time, he gets two doses and hopes taking both together will be strong enough but instead those doses are only 96% filler. Each dose is four times the intended dose and our drug buyer takes two, so he gets 8 times the intended dose. He overdoses and dies. Repeat enough and an epidemic is born.
That hometown newspaper attributes much of the epidemic to doctors being generous with narcotic painkiller prescriptions, leading to addicted patients, followed by a period of doctors more carefully prescribing narcotics and driving their former patients to the black market. I have no idea if this is fair to doctors.
Its the difference between illicit and legal production.
Any legal producer of any drug will not want to destroy the money flow they make selling legal drugs. If you make legal fentanyl there is no way you will rile up the US (or any other government of a customer country) by selling illegal stuff to be smuggled in. The price you get will be lower anyway. (The big markups in the illegal drug trade happen much further down the supply chain.)
But if all you do is make illegal drugs, you have no legal market to worry about damaging. The illegal sources of most drugs like meth, cocaine and the like have never had anything to do with a legal drug source.
The trouble with fentanyl is that it is insanely potent, and not especially complex. So, once an understanding of how to synthesise it becomes known, it is just too easy for it to become a problem. The entire legal annual world production seems to be 1.7 tons. Which is a silly small mass. You get individual cocaine busts that are nearly that big. Cocaine production worldwide is maybe 500 times that by mass, albeit mostly for illegal trade.
As well as illegal synthesis, it appears that a significant problem in some counties is diversion of medical supplies. A few years ago here in Oz, it was discovered that almost the entire stock of vials of injectable fentanyl in one ambulance service had been replaced with vials of water. I think a couple of paramedics are now enjoying some striped pyjama time. It seems to have become the first line of analgesia for acute pain and emergency departments seems to run on it. Temptation is likely not too far away.
What’s Fentanyl’s multiplier between the effective recreational dose and the LD50?
What is a typical recreational dose of fentanyl? What are the typical prices at the 1, 100, 1000 doses ranges?
I’m having difficulty getting some ballpark number of a typical recreational dose but if it’s in the 100mcg range, then just 1kg of it is good for 10 000 000 doses. Wouldn’t that make it pretty much impossible to stamp out trafficking if 1g getting through is enough for 10 000 doses?
How stable a molecule is it? Enough to be easily mixed/diluted in innocuous goods then extracted out?
The potency reminds me of another very well-known substance that’s active in the 100mcg range. Is it easier to manufacture than that?
