Pure cocaine overdose deaths are relatively rare. Only around 5% of cocaine deaths involved pure cocaine, it's almost always mixed with something else.

> I also wonder if there's any link to the Oxycontin reforms. Perhaps now that prescription is reigned in, we are seeing a lot fewer oxy->fent cases which has cut back on the deaths.

Prescription pills have been a non-issue for a decade by now.

> Or maybe it's actually that the drug dealers have gotten more careful. Drug dealers don't want to kill their clients, so maybe they've been purposefully diluting to make sure they get repeat customers.

Yup. I think that's exactly it.

The major reason for fentanyl deaths was not unintentional overdose because of poor pill quality. It was way too easy to end up with 1mg instead of 500mcg during pill mixture preparation. So _reducing_ the amount of fentanyl per pill results in a better safety margin. And users can just smoke another pill if one pill was not enough to get high, after all.

And yeah, it's just possible that the more reckless drug users are just dead by now. But to be clear, it's still absolutely horrible. We're still above the 2021 level.