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Comment by codefreeordie | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a tangent, but the opening paragraph suggests that weed is now being cut with fentanyl causing death.

Is this actually true? It makes absolutely no sense at all, unless the goal of whoever is doing it actually is to kill people.

Cutting heroin or other opiates with Fentanyl can make sense (from a dealer's point of view), because it is extremely potent but not much more expensive than the desired drug -- so you can mix a tiny amount of fentanyl with loads of fillers and then cut that into the actual drug, and your buyer will probably never know. Until you screw up and put a tiny bit too much fentanyl in and then lots of your customers die. But this model, however fucked up, makes sense.

Cutting things like weed with fentanyl truly makes no sense to me at all except as a fucked up way to murder people.

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Most fentanyl in non-opiates (such as cocaine) is the result of accidental contamination, not intentional cutting. It happens late in the supply chain: a dealer sells two different drugs, uses the same scale for both, and doesn't completely sanitize them in between, so you get a few remaining "crumbs" or residue of fentanyl accidentally mixed in.

This is an issue with fentanyl because it's so potent that a small amount which would be a non-issue for opiate users can easily kill a person with no tolerance for the drug.

It's also dangerous because, when mixed with stimulants like cocaine, the overdose doesn't necessarily happen immediately - the stimulants will briefly mask the effects of the opiates, raising the heart rate, but then they'll wear off and the opiates will suppress breathing to the point of death. Because the effects aren't always immediate, the drug user (or those around them) don't connect the person's behavior to the drug use, so they don't always recognize it as an opiate overdose requiring immediate emergency attention and Narcan.

Source: used to work for a nonprofit that conducted harm reduction education training

That's interesting, and it does make sense -- if you're not using opiates, tiny residues of fentanyl can be very dangerous.

You would think that dealers would be more careful than that -- killing your customers is bad for business -- but it makes way more sense than intentionally cutting fentanyl into pot.

A little bit of searching shows no documented evidence of fentanyl mixed with weed.

The supposed reason is dealers trying to get their weed users addicted, but that doesn't make a ton of sense as they'd have to either fess up or be the only weed dealer someone knows.

Plus, I'm not positive the temperature of burning marijuana would do anything to fentanyl or if the temps would destroy it.

You can smoke fentanyl the same way you freebase cocaine, with a lighter and tinfoil or small pipe.

Which is not how you smoke marijuana. I edited my post to indicate I'm not sure if it's too low a temp to be activated or so high it destroys it.

maybe marijuana is a catch all for all thc methods. not to much different between a dab rib and a meth pipe when you simplify it. also dmt needs to be vaporized but a common way to take it is to fill a pipe with weed flower and put the dmt on top, then light it. it does work...

> with a lighter and tinfoil or small pipe.

>> Which is not how you smoke marijuana.

People don't use a pipe to smoke marijuana?

Here's a NIH paper on less people injecting fentanyl and other opiods in favor of smoking fentanyl. I think you can conclude that smoking it is an adequate delivery system and doesn't destroy it, just like freebasing cocaine.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34482046/

>People don't use a pipe to smoke marijuana?

Different pipes/heating methods. I'm not saying there's no way to smoke fentanyl, I'm unsure if sprinkling it on marijuana is one of them.

Haven't read the article (can't be bothered to work around the paywall), but the fentanyl scare is driven in large part by "copaganda". Cops treat fentanyl like some sort of boogeyman (to the point that they have panic attacks when they think they might have had fentanyl somewhere in their presence, get "revived" with narcan, and further perpetuate the myth that fentanyl is some mythical thing that can kill you just by looking at).

This isn't to say that fentanyl (and opiates in general) isn't a huge problem in the US (I couldn't possibly count the number of legit narcan wakeups I've done over the years), but fentanyl in particular is really prone to exaggerated claims by law enforcement that don't pass the sniff (or snort?) test.

I don't know - fentanyl has done some serious damage to the population. I would probably disagree with what you are saying and how you are dismissive/minimizing its damage.

The person you’re replying to is a paramedic who claims to have actively stopped people from overdosing. I think they have a pretty good idea of how damaging it can be.

They fully acknowledged the danger to the general public. That can be true while also acknowledging the hysteria [1] present in many law enforcement agencies.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/magazine/police-fentanyl-...

Fair hysteria isn't helpful.

That said there's been a lot of fentanyl deaths and it ain't making any communities better off having it. It's cheap, easy to get and the cartels can easily justify losing people to selling large batches.

Only way they can stop the cartels continue to get more of a foothold is by decreasing demand of the product. Not saying their approach is a good approach but I understand why they would try it.

There are videos of police officers falling to the ground and claiming it was because they said they TOUCHED something laced with fentanyl. As far as I have read that isn't possible.

Here is a video of me touching fentanyl and not getting high or collapsing https://www.instagram.com/tv/CaDE8XblaKy/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y...

Have a heard time believing this statement.

Believing which statement?

Lethal dose of fentanyl VS heroin VS carfentanyl: https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2021/2021...

You need a very precise scale to measure those quantities...

It was wonderful that we had the crying, puking, fainting fentanyl cops during the time that Havana Syndrome was being pushed.

When you accused Havana Syndrome sufferers of mass hysteria, Authorities would start explaining to you like you were a child how very important and very professional the sufferers are, and how it's just like not believing women when you don't believe that they were brain damaged by secret, very quiet, commie sound ray guns. You could reply with a video of a fentanyl cop.

My conspiracy theory based on absolutely nothing is this is a way for the government to get everyone off all drugs. Create enough doubt in everyone’s mind that they stop doing it. Worked on me, I do coke about once a year but not any more, there’s a pretty high chance of dying.

The US government murdered, by some estimates, around 10K people by poisoning alcohol during prohibition.

Did they poison alcohol that they knew were destined for human consumption (eg. they found some moonshiner's shack, broke in, poisoned the alcohol, and then left)? Or did they poison industrial alcohols not meant for human consumption? I can see how the former would be murder, but not the latter.

They added poison to industrial alcohols because they knew it was being used by people for consumption.

The industry whitewashing language is "creating abuse-resistant/deterrant formulations". Sounds great on paper, but the mechanism is generally some variant of "if you do abusive behavior with this you'll die or suffer some other health threatening complication.

In other words, poisoning.

In other news, many opioid pain medicines are only available in formulations mixed with acetaminophen, as a "deterrent" to abuse, because acetaminophen is acutely toxic in moderately large doses.

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