4 ms·

> Illegal drug manufacturers have a moderate economic pressure to increase purity, but - short of not immediately killing users and losing your customer base -

> Illegal drug manufacturers have a moderate economic pressure to increase purity, but - short of not immediately killing users and losing your customer base - they have little economic incentive to ensure that the impurities that remain in the final product are safe or inert. From the time of alcohol prohibition, it was the government that was introducing contaminated batches that killed people. It was done for propaganda, to solidify the message "drugs are bad". When I read articles about another teenager died of bad Ecstasy batch, this always comes to my mind. It always accompanies PSA saying that bad batches are circulating in the area etc. but somehow nobody else dies. Then when you read article almost always it turns out the drug wasn't actually Ecstasy, but that information is hidden deep in the article. It's disgusting how such tragedies are used for propaganda purposes and it is never investigated if it was actually government involvement in the killings.

cwkoss 5y ago
I totally believe that there have been instances where governmental actors have intentionally poisoned drug supplies, but I don't think that's the majority of cases. Watching Vice documentaries about clandestine manufacturing and the conditions they work in, it is not hard for me to believe that the most frequent cause is just lack of will and chemistry talent in order to purify a substance. Cleaning inert cutting agents out of drugs is fairly easy because the molecules are often dissimilar. But when manufacturing drugs, there are often steps that have probabilistic products that are very similar. Hypothetical example: you end up with 99% MDMA but 1% something that is very structurally similar but has no recreational value and is cardiotoxic. These molecules are so similar that the only way to separate them are challenging and expensive: such as multiple rounds of recrystalization and chromatography. Only a tiny portion drug buyers will notice the 1% cardiotoxic byproduct (access to GCMS testing?), so there is no economic incentive to do these final expensive cleaning steps.

cwkoss 5y ago

I totally believe that there have been instances where governmental actors have intentionally poisoned drug supplies, but I don't think that's the majority of cases. Watching Vice documentaries about clandestine manufacturing and the conditions they work in, it is not hard for me to believe that the most frequent cause is just lack of will and chemistry talent in order to purify a substance. Cleaning inert cutting agents out of drugs is fairly easy because the molecules are often dissimilar. But when manufacturing drugs, there are often steps that have probabilistic products that are very similar. Hypothetical example: you end up with 99% MDMA but 1% something that is very structurally similar but has no recreational value and is cardiotoxic. These molecules are so similar that the only way to separate them are challenging and expensive: such as multiple rounds of recrystalization and chromatography. Only a tiny portion drug buyers will notice the 1% cardiotoxic byproduct (access to GCMS testing?), so there is no economic incentive to do these final expensive cleaning steps.