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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

It always confuses me when I hear of kids dying to OD'ing on this stuff; why cut your product with so much of something that would kill your customers?

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It's accidental. The problem with fentanyl is that it's so ridiculously strong.

So you're selling heroin and figure "hey, I'll cut it and make more money". You add something inert and then add a tiny bit of a fentanyl and oops you added too much, now it's poisonous for users to take a "normal" dose.

Just wait until Dsuvia hits the black market. Reportedly 10x stronger than Fentanyl. https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/u...

Sufentanil is already available on the black market. It’s been seized in Canada a few times.

It is ridiculously potent. We’re talking a normal dose of 10’s of micrograms.

However. I would argue diversion of Dsuvia will likely reduce overdoses as the quality control means you know exactly how much you’re taking.

The impression I'm starting to get is that the dealers sometimes fail to mix properly when cutting the product. This means that one batch can create doses with widely varying concentrations.

Then you get cases where one distributor dilutes their product so much that their customers get used to taking very large amounts to get a high. Then one of those customers switches to another supplier with a "more normal" concentration and unwittingly overdoses.

Then there's the people that develop a tolerance to the drug over time, and keep trying higher and higher doses to get the same high.

And all of that is before you get into measuring errors and other mistakes caused by people doing complex chemistry without any formal training.

It's accidental - fentanyl is active in the microgram range, so the tiniest mistake can be fatal. Common warning about fentanyl:

> This substance is extraordinarily potent (i.e. active in the microgram range), to the point that the pure powder can result in a fatal overdose if spilled on one's skin. [...] It is strongly encouraged to wear gloves while handling, use volumetric dosing combined with a milligram scale

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Fentanyl (notably heroin doesn't have the same warning)

Here's a blog that includes a photo of how much is a lethal dose.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2018/05/true...

Imagine you have 100g of this stuff, and you have to dilute it with sugars. You need a ratio of something like 50ug fentanyl per 300mg of sugar.

Your 100g contains 2,000,000 doses of fentanyl. 2m * 300mg = 600kg.

So you need 600kg of sugar to correctly dilute your 100g of fentanyl.

Dilution is hard.

It's much stronger than meth. Current meth users try fentanyl without knowing what they're getting themselves into and they can easily take too much and OD. It has been a huge problem in the region I grew up in (rural midwest US).

As a general rule, it's relatively unusual for methamphetamine users to get into fentanyl/heroin and vice versa. Two different scenes.

Now, there are always a few "garbagehead" addicts that'll use whatever you got, but that's not common in my experience, since opiate addicts chase calm, sleepy euphoria and meth/cocaine addicts chase stimulating, energetic euphoria. Different scenes, different personality types. Probably different genetics as well.

I thought the same, since dealers probably want repeat customers. Apparently since fentanyl is so concentrated the profit margins compared to heroin are orders of magnitude greater

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