> I’ve heard a plausible explanation

To be blunt it was total bullshit. Pharmaceuticals have an extremely wide range of dosages. Fentanyl is on the extreme low end, benadryl an adult might take 25 mg or 50 mg, tylenol an adult might take 500 mg, and something like amoxicillin an adult might take as much as 3000 mg for a severe infection. There are standard, extremely reliable ways to prepare pills that contain the correct dosage regardless of the potency of the pure chemical.

Obviously fentanyl (or its precursor) is imported (ie smuggled) in highly pure form in order to minimize the size of the shipment. Obviously it can't be consumed in that form.

The combination of being potent and cheap to smuggle lends itself nicely to cutting other (more expensive) products with it. That's false advertising but it won't typically kill you in and of itself.

When laymen who don't know what they're doing, don't have access to proper facilities, and certainly can't set up proper quality controls process something that potent it's no wonder that things go wrong and people die. If (for example) the same victims had purchased fentanyl from a pharmacy (as opposed to whatever it was they thought they were consuming) they almost certainly would not have had any issues. Almost no one ODs intentionally.

The point is that it's not "fentanyl is toxic so you OD" it's "the person compounding the pill messed up the dosage, you took more than you thought, so you OD". This could happen just as easily with any other drug. The danger here is due to pills not containing the dosage that the consumer believes them to.

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jmalicki 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Other drugs aren't dosed in micrograms. It's pretty believable that street labs don't having the precision to get reliable dosing in such small quantities. 50/100mcg is the typical ambulance dosing of fentanyl (where it's often used as the primary painkiller) - so at 500 times smaller than that of benadryl, it would take a reasonably high-end lab (at least by mid-level drug dealer standards) to not wildly mess up the dosing all the time - even if you mixed at larger scales, that still doesn't easily guarantee a uniform blend.

It couldn't happen "just as easily" with any other drug.

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herbst 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LSD is an even smaller dose and I never heard of extremely strong LSD on the streets. Dealers manage to do their work properly.

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zipy124 10 hours ago | parent [-]

LSD is dropped onto paper in solution though. So to control dose is easy since you can easy halve a dose by doubling the volume of solution. Dosing a powder/crystal is much more difficult, especially if you need to get it back out of solution.

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herbst an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Fentanyl can be dropped onto a paper. As others said LSD is a salt, something will also dissolve fenta.

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sva_ 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LSD is a powder/crystal (a salt). People just don't consume opioids orally, usually. There's something similar though: skin patches, since (other than LSD) fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin.

	▲	jmalicki an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In context, we're talking about pills cut with fentanyl, in which case it is often consumed orally, mixed in at a very small concentration compared to the other ingredients. Powedered drugs like cocaine mixed with fentanyl are even more horrible, since there is absolutely nothing to keep the concentration of fentanyl homogeneous throughout as it is handled.
	▲	cap11235 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Blotters.

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fc417fc802 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's "pretty believable" but it's also complete bullshit. Why do you feel it necessary to comment in an authoritative manner when you don't know what you're talking about? It's literally spreading misinformation.

The relevant technique is called "serial dilution" and it's regularly practiced in intro level chemistry and molecular biology classes. An otherwise untrained undergrad, using only a pipette and a volumetric flask, can consistently and reliably dilute samples to nanogram per liter levels. The error accumulates as some (exceedingly small) percentage of the target value per dilution step so even after 10 or more steps the error will remain well within manageable range.

The issue is not fentanyl having a power level over 9000 or whatever other nonsense. It's people who don't know what they're doing, don't have access to a proper setup, and have no realistic way to implement a proper quality control regime manufacturing pharmaceuticals.

Fentanyl didn't kill all these people. Objectively poor public policy indirectly led to the deaths of those who violated the law just as it did during prohibition.

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15155 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why do you think fentanyl is typically distributed in patch form (transdermal delivery) or highly dilute injection in a hospital setting?