> All of this culminated with my life ending clinically for 8 minutes on Monday night, when I took what looked like a Percocet to take the edge off. It wasn’t Percocet at all, it was Fentanyl, and it sent me almost immediately into cardiac arrest. I’m alive after two doses of Narcan, 8 minutes of CPR, and a defibrillator jolt to my chest.
Yes people with high tolerance can handle fentanyl. People press fentanyl into perks because percocet is “safer” and more familiar.
We wouldnt have these problems if there was a safe and legal route to get drugs. People in withdrawal don’t care about the laws. Pressed fentanyl and fentanyl is everywhere.
Edit: This exists because people like to get high and also because people are already addicted. Chinese supply of fentanyl has dwarfed the supply of heroin as it is way cheaper and easier to produce and import. So if you are puking and dopesick as hell you need this to literally function normally. The supply of heroin has gone way down. People don’t care if it is dangerous when they are in withdrawal, or basically just generally. Also, “everyone” other than the user ODs is the mentality. Either it won’t happen to me or I am so depressed/fucked I don’t care if I die.
Thats the main attitude in my experience.
Short answer: Fentanyl is easier to smuggle because more doses can be packed into a smaller space. The black market has no regulations.
Long answer: Because recreational opiates are illegal and unregulated. This creates a market incentive for people willing to take the legal risk to cater to the market that wants recreational opiates. Fentanyl is essentially a cost-cutting and risk management technique within the supply chain, because more doses can be smuggled in the same shipment.
I suspect that, before the pills were pressed, the fentanyl just wasn't mixed in well enough. These kinds of mistakes are very rare in a legal and regulated market.
Want to fix the problem? Support drug reform.
However the amount of fentanyl that makes up an appropriate dose is very much smaller than other opiates. Other opiates in their pure form are more human scale amounts instead of “milligrams is a fatal dose”.
Why fentanyl is dangerous is because drug dealers are poorly preparing counterfeit drugs as a result of its high potency. Poorly mixed with fillers, one pill does nothing, the next one kills you.
Users really should crush all the pills and mix the powder thoroughly so one unit of powder always contains the same amount of active compound.
It is not in theory a bad idea but in practice perhaps not the most reasonable advice.
With opiods people build up a tolerance and then progress to stronger stuff. They end up regularly taking dosages that can potentially kill them, even not as a mistake. It's a very dangerous thing to do and hard to imagine being legalized to the extend addicts would want.
Unfortunately this is a very common way of cutting pills with stronger drugs and stretching products for drug dealers.
Xanex and Percs are often crushed up, then cut with Fentanyl and vitamins to be re-pressed into the original pill form to be sold on the street as a prescription drug.