Are you referring to LSD? I don’t actually know doses.
But yes, fentanyl is much easier to synthesize.
That’s why I included meth as an afterthought … the precursor to meth comes from over-the-counter antihistamines … so there’s a direct line from legal production and sales into the illegal trade … these pharmaceutical companies make a tidy profit sending train-loads into Mexico.
As far as how easy it is to make fentanyl … that’s a relative thing … unlike meth production, some of these reagents aren’t found at your local hardware store … I don’t know where you’d get dry methanol, make it I suppose … however, the three step method I just read through {[del]Cite[/del]} give rather encouraging conversion rates, really only one step needs any serious purification processes.
The precursor to fentanyl is “ubiquitous” in the drug trade … Wikipedia gives a list of all the drugs made from Piperidine … I’m guessing pharmaceutical companies make a tidy profit here as well.
I guess the DEA will be by here later today asking why I’m ordering all these damned organo-halides
Precursors are an insidious problem. Piperidine however is itself easy to make, and one of its precursors is used in huge quantities. Even without, start with black pepper. I suspect that given enough incentive it would not be hard to make fentanyl ab-initio. Given its astounding potency you could probably purchase enough precursor material from many chemical supply companies over the counter without anyone batting an eyelid to make an idiotic number of doses. You only need by it by the litre.
Again, the money to be made supplying the illegal drug industry is not huge. All the money is made once the drugs hit the supply chain. Methylamine - the usual precursor to meth is made in industrial quantities, and not by pharmaceutical companies per-se. At 100,000 tons a year, the amount diverted to illegal meth production is close to rounding error.
Anti-histamines aren’t used as an illicit precursor. You may be thinking of Pseudoephedrine, which is used. That is a pretty dreadful tale. Rather than the drug companies making much money from selling Pseudoephedrine into the illegal trade, they have seen their domestic market for it dry up as ever more restrictive laws kill the sales. Here in Oz it is next to impossible to get a cold medicine with it in. And the alternatives are basically little more than a placebo. Most of the money in drugs is made selling them in legal markets. Pharmaceutical companies make a handsome amount of money because the price are high, a lot of which is due to rigorous laws controlling purity and testing. There is a high barrier to entry, and a large market. Selling to illegal meth manufactures isn’t going to make them much money. I’m sure they all wish nobody had worked out how to use Pseudoephedrine for meth.
Whence the magic of pseudoephedrine for colds?
Is it related to pseudoephedrine being a phenethylamine? If so, does that mean that other phenethylamines would be effective as cold medicines?
Any sparse data on how that breaks down? I’m sure most people reading this thread will have heard about Steven Levitt’s work*. I’m curious about the markup at each step of the supply chain
- If you haven’t, get some of this: chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittVenkateshAnEconomicAnalysis2000.pdf or this for an easier to read presentation: Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms
I saw a television program that interviewed people who wholesale heroin.
They said when they have a new shipment come in, they lace a handful with fentanyl so some will overdose.
It’s a sales gimmick apparently, if addicts hear this batch is making people OD, “must be some good shit!”
A local nurse was able to acquire fentanyl for a long time without arousing suspicion, because she was collecting used Duragesic patches and removing the drug-impregnated gel with an insulin syringe. This way, the count wasn’t off and nobody suspected anything until she left a patch behind with a needle hole in it.
Carfentanil is a veterinary drug with very few legal sources in the U.S.; it is mostly used to tranquilize large animals because it’s so potent.
[quote=“nearwildheaven, post:26, topic:769329”]
A local nurse was able to acquire fentanyl for a long time without arousing suspicion, because she was collecting used Duragesic patches and removing the drug-impregnated gel with an insulin syringe. This way, the count wasn’t off and nobody suspected anything until she left a patch behind with a needle hole in it.
Carfentanil is a veterinary drug with very few legal sources in the U.S.; it is mostly used to tranquilize large animals because it’s so potent.[/QUOTE
I’m not disputing your anecdote, just the part about a used patch with a needle hole in it.
Used skin patches are kinda crumpled and a insulin syringe uses such a small gauge needle that any hole would be near invisible. I would be interested to read the story.
That is mind-boggling.
“The patient felt nothing” would presumably be pretty much the key goal of anaesthetists wouldn’t it?
Yeah, it’s mind boggling that I was able to lay there watching them evaluate my coronary arteries and place a stent with zero discomfort.
But when they told me I’d be receiving fentanyl, I was all excited. Trainspotting time, thought I!
[quote=“steatopygia, post:27, topic:769329”]
[quote=“nearwildheaven, post:26, topic:769329”]
A local nurse was able to acquire fentanyl for a long time without arousing suspicion, because she was collecting used Duragesic patches and removing the drug-impregnated gel with an insulin syringe. This way, the count wasn’t off and nobody suspected anything until she left a patch behind with a needle hole in it.
Carfentanil is a veterinary drug with very few legal sources in the U.S.; it is mostly used to tranquilize large animals because it’s so potent.
[/QUOTE
I’m not disputing your anecdote, just the part about a used patch with a needle hole in it.
Used skin patches are kinda crumpled and a insulin syringe uses such a small gauge needle that any hole would be near invisible. I would be interested to read the story.[/QUOTE]
I have no problem believing that. What likely happened was that the person was very careful to use the right kind of needle and insert it where it couldn’t be seen, then did something different. Or someone who knew what a used Duragesic patch should look like saw one and something didn’t look right to them.
Part of my father’s job as an institutional pharmacist was to investigate drug diversions. He had some stories about creative ways to steal narcotics. Usually, the thief gets confident that nothing will happen, then makes a mistake. My father never shared his all of his tricks with staff because he didn’t want someone coming up with a foolproof plan.
I remember hearing about fentanyl about 30 years ago at a training given by the DEA. I seem to remember them saying that it was so potent that it was very difficult to cut reliably without industrial equipment, centrifuges come to mind. Illicit chemists might end up with one sample that had none of the drug and the next one might have three times the lethal amount. A DuPont chemist who made some 3 methylfentanyl (100x stronger than fentanyl) up and tried to sell it to undercover agents. DEA put the street value of the drug at $28,000,000 an ounce. Can you think of anything else that has a street value of a million dollars a gram?
Given all of these indications of its potent danger, how is it that fentanyl can be safely produced in lollipop form?
Fentanyl is about 80 times more potent than morphine*. If 3 methylfentanyl is 100x the potency of fentanyl, that would mean 8000 times the potency of morphine which seems a bit much. This** says 3-methylfentanyl has 10-15 times the potency of fentanyl which seems more realistic.
This would mean that the DEA exaggerated the dangers and retail value of a psychoactive substance. I know, right?!
With these corrections, I definitely can think of things with equal or greater retail value as 3 methylfentanyl. LSD (100K$/g) and ETH-LAD (140K$/g) are up there but they don’t make good substances for megalomaniac drug lords.
May I tag on a question about what actually kills people when they have a heroin/fentanyl overdose? Is it a vicious spiral of the brain sending less impulses to the heart/lungs, the heart sending less blood to the brain/lungs and the lungs sending less oxygen to the brain/heart?
Acute death from opioids tend to come in two flavors:
-
Sudden pulmonary edema from contaminants in the drug, causing one’s lungs to fill up with fluid. Don’t get enough oxygen to the brain, die.
-
More often it’s just severe respiratory depression. Receptors for controlling respiration in the brainstem get the message that they shouldn’t send signals to breathe automatically. Don’t breathe enough, don’t get enough oxygen to the brain, die.
A quick google search shows that fentanyl salts (fentanyl citrate, fentanyl HCL) are soluble in water. In a pharma lab, a fentanyl solution is probably easy to assure, even when diluting to a near-homeopathic degree.
But if you’re synthesizing fentanyl in a less rigorous environment, it may be possible to get a version that is insoluble in water. An insoluble opiate of fentanyl’s strength would be hard to cut with any degree of certainty.
(I’m no chemist, as any chemists in the audience have already ascertained. Please, chemists, speak up and correct me).
It’s my understanding that various syntheses typically generate a range of opiates in a single step, with significant amounts of, say, codeine as a byproduct. The risk, I’d imagine, is that you set out to make fentanyl citrate and end up with 60% fentanyl citrate, 10% codeine and 30% fentanyl-not-water-soluble-ide. The non-water-soluble part will form a mixture (as opposed to a solution) and a non-homogenous mixture at that.
If you’re not checking, you could easily end up with some portion of your product being much, much stronger than the rest. And then bad things start happening to end users.
Those are meant to be used only by patients in hospice, and the dose is distributed through the whole lollipop. It is absorbed through the mucous membranes in the mouth.
We were told in pharmacy school that if someone is found dead with a needle in their arm, they did not die from an overdose; they most likely died from an anaphylactic reaction to something the dose was cut with.
At my old hospital, we had a teenage boy wind up in the ICU after what was supposed to be a routine outpatient procedure, because he confused “pain control” with “pain free” and asked for too much morphine. They gave him some Narcan when they realized what was going on, and kept him overnight. In short, he was definitely opiate-naive. I would imagine that the nurses didn’t suspect anything at first because people react so widely to pain and drugs, and he COULD have that much morphine if he needed it. However, it turned out he didn’t. :o
Kayaker, it sounds like you had conscious sedation and it worked great for you. 
[quote=“MsRobyn, post:31, topic:769329”]
Last night, I was noodling around on my state’s disciplinary actions website, and found one pharmacist who probably went into it so he could get drugs :mad: and among other things, he stole a bunch of Demerol tablets and replaced them with colchicine. :eek: (This was in the late 1980s). Incredibly, he’s still licensed, so I guess he must have followed the board’s instructions to get treatment.
ETA: Brand Demerol and colchicine, which is used for gout, are both small round tablets, white in color.
Not long after I graduated, I worked for a while at a large hospital in another city, and while changing out patients’ trays for their daily non-controlled oral meds, once found a large vial of injectable morphine with the plastic flip top removed; however, the stopper wasn’t punctured. Not only did we not keep bulk morphine on the floor, let alone in an unlocked cart in the hallway, it was not a size or manufacturer that we carried. 
We never found out where that came from.
This was over 12 years ago but I had those wonderpops ( :D) a couple of times for in-bed dressing changes.
The changes were usually done in the OR under a general. Maybe the ORs were booked up.