ELI5: Fentanyl?

[Wayne]

Ok, so I need someone to explain this to me like I'm 5 years old (ELI5)...

Every night it seems, we're hearing stories of drug dealers getting caught with hundreds of thousands of Fentanyl tablets. Literally enough to kill off entire populations of the country at one fell swoop. Arizona in the last few days says they caught two of these asshats with 108,000 pills...

Why? If one pill is enough to kill you absolutely dead, and a few grams will probably do the job unless you're extremely lucky, what is the purpose of bringing such a deadly, non-recreational drug into the country? What's the market for it?

Wayne

 

[redrumloa]

Ok, so I need someone to explain this to me like I'm 5 years old (ELI5)...

Every night it seems, we're hearing stories of drug dealers getting caught with hundreds of thousands of Fentanyl tablets. Literally enough to kill off entire populations of the country at one fell swoop. Arizona in the last few days says they caught two of these asshats with 108,000 pills...

Why? If one pill is enough to kill you absolutely dead, and a few grams will probably do the job unless you're extremely lucky, what is the purpose of bringing such a deadly, non-recreational drug into the country? What's the market for it?

Wayne

Fentanyl in and of itself isn't the problem. It is prescribed legally for pain management by doctors to people with chronic pain. The problem is apparently it is easy and cheap to produce illegally. It is also apparently extremely dangerous to extremely lethal in anything but small controlled doses.

Illegal drugs have a history of being "laced" with something else other than what it is sold as. Historically something like marijuana may be laced with something else where the person smoking a joint will get more than stoned from marijuana. Cocaine has always been cut (aka diluted) with questionable substances. It also has been laced by some producers. Other old school drugs had that problem at times. I don't remember the story exactly, I'm betting Google remembers, but IIRC at Woodstock someone from the stage warned that a bad (dangerous) drug was being circulated.

Fast forward to modern day and news outlets are claiming that nearly everything illegal coming across the border from Mexico is either laced with Fentanyl, or outright faked with only Fentanyl as an ingredient. One major modern day problem for some people is opioid pain medications like Vicodin. I've heard there are fake Vicodin pill being circulated that are not that at all, but just Fentanyl in dangerously high amounts.

People with a Vicodin addiction expecting just that are ingesting say a handful off pills that are actually Fentanyl and having extreme overdoses. A Vicodin addict could ingest 5-10 real pills due to their tolerance to it, but instead they get a none of that and all of Fentanyl. Again, these illegal pills are apparently not even consistent with the amount of Fentanyl they put in it and it seems Fentanyl is so cheap to make they just put a ton in anything.

Moral of the story? If media reports are to be believed, illegal drugs coming across the border, especially Opioid based pills, are a dangers risk to take. It's cheap to make and the big cartels don't care what happens to the "druggie" after they get their money.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Ok, so I need someone to explain this to me like I'm 5 years old (ELI5)...

Every night it seems, we're hearing stories of drug dealers getting caught with hundreds of thousands of Fentanyl tablets. Literally enough to kill off entire populations of the country at one fell swoop. Arizona in the last few days says they caught two of these asshats with 108,000 pills...

Why? If one pill is enough to kill you absolutely dead, and a few grams will probably do the job unless you're extremely lucky, what is the purpose of bringing such a deadly, non-recreational drug into the country? What's the market for it?

Wayne

Fentanyl is a powerful opioid but the poison is in the dose. As an opioid is suppresses pain but also suppresses certain autonomic functions like gut motility and (more crucially) breathing. People who overdose on opioids forget to breath because they stop responding to the over abundance of carbon dioxide in the blood. It is the presence of CO2 in the blood that stimulates breathing and the sense of suffocation. This is why you sometimes will hear stories of workers entering steel barges or other enclosed steel places and dying without alarm. The steel, when it rusts, can suck the oxygen out of the air in the enclosure and a person will not notice they are not getting enough oxygen. This is also the case when planes depressurize. You can quickly pass out without feeling like you are not getting oxygen.
As a tablet, fentanyl is used to control pain, just like other opioids. Because fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, the pills contain very little of the active ingredient and a lot of inert binder. This makes for cheap pills, just as artificial sweetners can sweeten products for far less money than the cost of sugar to get an equivalent sweetness. Also, the top end potency can be increased and fentanyl can be used to alleviate pain in late stage cancer where very little else works often. People who use these pain medication can build up a tolerance to them meaning that over time they require larger and larger doses to have the same effect.

Will have to get back to this later. Got a meal reservation to make.

 

[redrumloa]

Fentanyl is a powerful opioid but the poison is in the dose. As an opioid is suppresses pain but also suppresses certain autonomic functions like gut motility and (more crucially) breathing. People who overdose on opioids forget to breath because they stop responding to the over abundance of carbon dioxide in the blood. It is the presence of CO2 in the blood that stimulates breathing and the sense of suffocation. This is why you sometimes will hear stories of workers entering steel barges or other enclosed steel places and dying without alarm. The steel, when it rusts, can suck the oxygen out of the air in the enclosure and a person will not notice they are not getting enough oxygen. This is also the case when planes depressurize. You can quickly pass out without feeling like you are not getting oxygen.
As a tablet, fentanyl is used to control pain, just like other opioids. Because fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, the pills contain very little of the active ingredient and a lot of inert binder. This makes for cheap pills, just as artificial sweetners can sweeten products for far less money than the cost of sugar to get an equivalent sweetness. Also, the top end potency can be increased and fentanyl can be used to alleviate pain in late stage cancer where very little else works often. People who use these pain medication can build up a tolerance to them meaning that over time they require larger and larger doses to have the same effect.

Will have to get back to this later. Got a meal reservation to make.

Was that copy and paste or was that off the top of your head? If that was off the top of your head, I'm done

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

so ... like Red said ...
Fentanyl is so powerful that people running heroin can cut the heroin with cheap inert fillers and then spike it back to strength with fentanyl - or even better, just use cheap fentanyl and cut it down to heroin strength - or, like Red also said, make cheap fake prescription pills. It's just that fentanyl is so powerful and quality control is so slack that it's easy to give someone a lethal dose by negligence. Generally you don't want to ill off your customers, but there are so many customers and there will always be more so it barely matters.

I know of a few people who have lost their lives to the stuff.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Was that copy and paste or was that off the top of your head? If that was off the top of your head, I'm done

I read. And I even remember stuff sometimes.
Do you remember the Moscow theatre hostage situation in Russia many years back? I recall hearing at the time the Russians used a gas that went by a name something like "fenfen". Apparently the gas contained carfentanil which is 100 times more potent that fentanil!
Chechen rebels had taken about 800 hostages in the theatre. It was believed that the rebels had rigged explosives so the rescue plan was to gas everyone into unconsciousness, go in and shoot the sleeping rebels and rescue the sleeping people. The whole thing was a gong show. The gas worked, and the rebels were killed, but there were so many people to resuscitate, so little manpower to do it, not enough resources to get everyone to hospital safely and quickly and a secrecy about the gas that impeded the ability of doctors to determine the correct treatment.
Carfentanil (carfantanyl) is marketed as "Wildnil" as an anesthetic for large animals and China makes the stuff by the boatload for cheap and it has been making it to the street. The Chinese aren't doing much to stop it and they probably see it as payback for the opium wars.