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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> 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

This is the problem with drugs being illegal. There's no way to tell what is in illegally manufactured drugs.

This is why drugs should be legal for legally consenting adults. They'll be able to get pharmaceutical quality drugs with confidence about what they are.

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Percocet isn't illegal. Her abusing Percocet without a prescription is.

Seriously, how did you get to the conclusion that a) she's abusing it and b) that she's doing that without a prescription?

Because when a doctor prescribes Percocet and you go to a pharmacy to get it, you don't accidentally end up with fentanyl instead. That only happens when you buy it illegally from a dealer.

Also, doctors normally don't prescribe percocet or other strong opiates to "take the edge off" (i.e. psychiatric treatment). That's what barbiturates and anxiolytics are for.

If she's got a prescription, then this needs to be headline news because the supply is tainted and will kill people.

More likely, she obtained the pills without a prescription. I won't speak to abusing it since that can be such a loaded word.

That or the pharmacist made a horrible mistake and would be headed to court and possibly jail. Also newsworthy and also a relatively unlikely explanation.

She mentions relapse and years of sobriety, plus fentanyl is a pretty extreme opioid, I think they only give it to people with things like very advanced cancer, so it seems pretty unlikely her prescription was accidentally filled with that.

>There's no way to tell what is in illegally manufactured drugs.

Legal items are counterfeited all the time. And lots of cannabis in California's legal cannabis market comes from illegal grows with unsupervised processes, for example.

Agreed, with the caveat that how you make drugs available can have consequences of at least as much gravity.

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