9 ms·
7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose
- metadat 3y agoSo maybe start with a quarter tablet? .. </sarcasm> Genuine question: How does it make fiscal business sense to kill your customers after one hit? Edit: thank you all for your informative replies
- newzisforsukas 3y agoSurely the DEA wouldn't exaggerate?
- geoffmanning 3y agonot an exaggeration, but relativity is everything here
- PaulHoule 3y agoYou develop a tolerance that sort of drug so a dose that would turn you or me into a zombie would barely register for a junkie.
- clipsy 3y ago> Genuine question: How does it make fiscal business sense to kill your customers after one hit? It doesn't. Even making the generous assumption that the DEA is being honest here, what constitutes a lethal dose for a non-user may be substantially less than what constitutes a lethal dose for a heavy-using addict.
- mikeyouse 3y agoIn college I worked in a hospital where one of the nurses was abusing fentanyl by taking the 'waste' and ordering doses for patients and not administering it. Eventually people caught on and confronted her, she offered to take a toxicology test to prove her innocence so they drew her blood. She was completely coherent, you would have a hard time knowing that she was the least bit altered, but she had something like 550mcg in her system. For a patient of her size with no tolerance, they'd likely administer 50mcg or 100mcg for regional anesthesia. It's crazy how much tolerance can build.
- tomcam 3y agoI’m incredibly fat (300 lbs) but they never have problems knocking me out with a light dose because I have zero experience with recreational drugs or alcohol. They need to up the dosage substantially for heavy weed users. Intellectually I would love to know how it affects her. Does she require ever-increasing doses? Did the first time put her to sleep? Is her driving impaired? So many questions…
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cdelsolar 3y agoHmm, there are definitely fatters.
- RajT88 3y agoFamously, a lot of Rock N' Roll overdoses are from former users who took a break, and then administered the dose they always recalled using, and then die from overdose. That's how much tolerance can build. Last one of these I read about was the singer to GWAR.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sp332 3y ago"Bay Area police union leader allegedly smuggled fentanyl into US to sell in bulk" https://abcnews.go.com/US/bay-area-police-union-leader-allegedly-smuggled-fentanyl/story?id=98271260 https://abcnews.go.com/US/bay-area-police-union-leader-alleg...
- paxys 3y agoIt doesn't. It's just that the people cutting cocaine, MDMA etc. with fentanyl aren't doing so in the most accurately calibrated settings.
- zdragnar 3y agoMy friend's father was on some form of opioid for much of my friend's life, due to a motorcycle accident that busted both his knees. Towards the end, he was on Actiq, a lozenge form of fentanyl citrate iirc. Supposedly it was strong enough to be fatal for someone without any opioid tolerance. These pills are probably much the same. Strong enough to get someone high who has built up a tolerance to everything else, but also strong enough to kill the uninitiated.
- worik 3y agoDo you think legalising safer drugs, like Heroin, would be a sensible step? [Edit: I do] I advocate legalising Opium straight away. I think Heroin is a step further than required. How many people have to die from synthetic opiate overdose? The obvious public health measure is to legalise the much safer natural alternatives.
- sneak 3y agoCigarettes are already legal despite killing 7x as many in the US as all opioids combined every day, week, month, and year. US drug policy is not about harm reduction or life saving, and never has been.
- worik 3y ago> Cigarettes are already legal despite killing 7x as many in the US as all opioids combined Is that true? I am not denying it, but the opiate overdose rate is staggering.
- notjulianjaynes 3y agoYeah it's somewhere near half a million people per year in the US die from diseases caused by cigarette smoking. Fent's body count last I checked was like 77,000. Whether they are a fair comparison I'm not sure. It might be more accurate to say that while fentanyl can kill you, cigarettes make you live less long, rather than to say they kill you. No one drops dead from lighting a cigarette. Meanwhile, if it weren't for unreliable dosing due to black market pressures, I'm not sure regular, reliably dosed opiate usage would kill you slow the way cigarettes do.[citation needed] Anecdotally, I've noticed that ex junkies often look ten years younger than they have any right to.
- huytersd 3y agoCigarettes are a slow poison and mild stimulant at worst. It really doesn’t modify a person’s day to day behavior in any significant way.
- grzeshru 3y ago[flagged]
- k12sosse 3y agoSo you mean the country is being flooded with a fatal product intending to cause harm?
- porkbeer 3y agoYou know where an overwhelming majority of it originates, correct?
- uaserussia 3y ago[dead]
- spicyusername 3y agoWhose design? To achieve what goal? These kind of conspiracy theories always remind me of the quote: Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
- k12sosse 3y agoWhy not make trafficking the big F an offense punishable with lethal injection? Seems just.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI see the appeal of simply killing every drug dealer, smuggler, and producer. I expect it would be a net improvement in lives saved. But I don't trust our governments to administer such a policy justly. I think the false-positive execution rate would be more than I could stomach.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoBecause it’s such a lucrative business with a built-in customer base. A criminal organization can make billions of dollars exporting it to the US. It’ll be very hard to make the borders that secure
- alpb 3y agoVast majority of the developed/civilized world has moved on from capital punishment, with a few exceptions like the US. We still execute people in this country and find out many years later that they were innocent.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- _heimdall 3y agoIs there any way they could guard against selection bias here? We don't know what percent of lethal dose exists in pills that weren't confiscated, how likely is it that they're disproportionately picked up those most likely to be selling the worst drugs?
- alejohausner 3y agoThe problem is that fentanyl is very strong, and drug traffickers have very poor quality controls. The LD50 is 0.03 mg/kg in monkeys, so if humans are like monkeys, a 70 kg human has a 50% chance of dying after ingesting 2 mg of fentanyl. A 1 mg pill of pure fentanyl would be very tiny. So drug traffickers mix the fentanyl with baking soda, tramadol, starch, whatever cheap additive they can get their hands on. Each trafficker adds more, to make the product nonlethal, but mostly to increase bulk, and increase profit. Unfortunately, they use blenders, kitchen mixers, and their bare hands. They don’t invest in pharmaceutical grade equipment. The mix is very uneven, so when an addict takes a hit, he or she may either get no buzz at all, get a nice high, or die of an overdose. Each hit is like Russian roulette. If only drug traffickers had better equipment, and quality controls. The way things are today, when you buy illegal drugs you don’t know what the hell you’re getting.
- cameldrv 3y agoI used to work on software for simulating mixing tanks in factories. Doing high quality mixing of powders is a major engineering challenge even for large companies.
- goldcd 3y agoI'm now imagining you being kidnapped and waking up in a laundry basement, with a kingpin looming over you asking "Can you mix?"
- dzhiurgis 3y agoDo routine users build up some tolerance?
- bartonfink 3y agoTypically no.