Comment by vikasnair | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vikasnair | Hacker News Reader

It’s important to note a significant percentage of these deaths are cases in which other substances with trace amounts of fentanyl are consumed unbeknownst to the user. Dealers often use the same scales, which is one risk factor for cross-contaminating supply.

My mother is a physician, she just last night told me about a case she saw over the weekend in which a young 20-something nearly OD’d on fentanyl from taking ecstasy. She survived, but with life-altering brain trauma rendering her unable to remember who she is. She needs tubes for her food supply, and a ventilator to breathe.

Here you can see a few images of what is a lethal dose of fentanyl: https://www.dea.gov/galleries/drug-images/fentanyl

Scary stuff, and maybe there’s an argument there to be made in favor of legalizing current black-market drugs. Definitely a PSA to test your drugs.

CDC on cross-contamination: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/other-drugs.html

This is the core issue. It’s not a fentanyl crisis, it’s a toxic drug crisis.

The drugs are often completely different from what they’re sold as, with all sorts of toxic things added.

People do a dose that is sensible based on their assumption of what the drug is, but the drug is something else, so their dose is completely incorrect and they overdose and die.

No drug user at this point should expect their drugs are what they’re advertised as.

Really we need to start changing terminology. A great deal of these deaths are not overdoses in the sense that people took too much of a drug but poisonings in that people took something they did not intend to take. It might seem like a minor detail, but if helps drive home the point that even users who do not take opiods are at risk, it is worth doing.

This is the core problem, I rarely ever hear of someone using fentanyl by itself. Fentanyl is incredibly potent which maximizes profit/volume for traffickers. This creates a tremendous financial incentive for them to adopt since it provides a competitive advantage. If it's easier and cheaper to obtain fentanyl than Alprazolam (xanax), then illicit manufacturers will produce a counterfeit using fentanyl as the active ingredient. Fentanyl overdoses are also frequently caused by improper mixing techniques (powder to powder) and the non-uniform distribution will result in someone getting a hot dose. In that case, testing might not even help.

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