Dark Web Dealers Voluntarily Ban Deadly Fentanyl (theguardian.com)

Major dark web drug suppliers have started to voluntarily ban the synthetic opioid fentanyl because it is too dangerous. "They are 'delisting' the high-strength painkiller, effectively classifying it alongside mass-casualty firearms and explosives as commodities that are considered too high-risk to trade," reports The Guardian. From the report: Vince O'Brien, one of the NCA's leads on drugs, told the Observer that dark web marketplace operators appeared to have made a commercial decision, because selling a drug that could lead to fatalities was more likely to prompt attention from police. It is the first known instance of these types of operators moving to effectively ban a drug.

O'Brien said: "If they've got people selling very high-risk commodities then it's going to increase the risk to them. There are marketplaces that will not accept listings for weapons and explosives -- those are the ones that will not accept listings for fentanyl. Clearly, law enforcement would prioritize the supply of weapons, explosives and fentanyl over, for example, class C drugs -- and that might well be why they do this. "There are also drug users on the dark web who say on forums that they don't think it's right that people are selling fentanyl because it is dangerous and kills a lot of people."

Comments

Re: there is no such thing as "dark web"

[Anonymous Coward]

In general, there's a much lower abuse potential for psychedelics. These are drugs that aren't always even enjoyable. Often, those drugs are taken for therapeutic sessions or the purpose of gaining insight.

Nobody shoots dope to work with a therapist on their issues. You might have low dose clinics, but you take the dope to relieve the symptoms so you can be barely functional enough for counseling. Psychedelics offer an active benefit above and beyond sobriety for therapy. Also, they're not likely to result in harm in the way they're often used, in relatively controlled, familiar setttings, with others around to monitor youm

It's the dose that makes the poison

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

Fentanyl actually has a fairly wide therapeutic index -- i.e. the dose that offers benefit vs. the dose that causes harm -- so it's fairly safe (at least as safe as a highly-addictive opioid can be) as far as prescription drugs go. IIRC acetaminophen (Tylenol) is actually easier to OD on. The problem is potency and the fact that pill pressers are buying pure fentanyl and trying to meter out the microscopic doses using crude tools.

It's easy to measure grams of a substance, so if 1 gram gets you high but 10 gram kills you, it's not hard to press out 1 gram pills and tell people to never take more than 3 of them.

Now imagine 1 microgram gets you high and 100 micrograms kills you. In terms of therapeutic index, it's actually 10 times safer. If you could reliably press out 1 microgram pills, nobody would ever accidentally OD on 100 pills. The problem is that joe schmoe pill pusher in his basement cannot accurately separate out 1 microgram of a pure substance, so he wants up cranking out pills that have anywhere from 3-50 micrograms of ingredients. You wind up with a bunch of pills where 2 of them might get you nicely really really high, but then another 2 will randomly kill you. Couple that with some people having high tolerance due to longtime use while other people are just starting out, one pill might be enough to kill a first time user if they're unlucky enough to get that one where joe pill pusher's hands slipped when he was pressing it.

The solution would be for the labs producing the stuff to only sell it in dilutions of 0.1% or so, but the market doesn't want that because mr. fentanyl smuggler only has to get one shipment from China through customs to make a million pills if he brings in the pure stuff. This is actually fentanyl's awesome market-winning feature -- its potency minimizes the smuggling risk, and this is why it's taken over the market from heroin in the U.S. for low-budget opioid addicts.

Of course the real truth of the matter is that opioid addiction is a fucking curse and the best thing to do is never ever start, but unfortunately big pharma likes it profits and creates tons of future fentanyl users every time it writes a new painkiller prescription. Next time your doctor considers writing you a scrip for some of the good stuff -- say sorry, I'll just take an aspirin and maybe smoke some weed.

Re: It's the dose that makes the poison

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point on therapeutic index.

As an addendum to your dilution point, if you can't measure accurately at small scale, dilute it or cut it with something else, then measure at a larger scale where mistakes aren't as punishing. If you don't want an ultimately cut product, dissolve it in a solvent, then evaporate off the solvent, preferably recovering it for recycling.

Re: It's the dose that makes the poison

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

You're expecting responsible behavior and the maintenance of large quantities of dilute with strict quality control from some guy with unknown education working in a basement somewhere with no oversight, and a customer base that literally cannot say no.

He almost certainly doesn't *want* to kill his customers, but that doesn't mean he has the know-how and discipline to do a good job of it, and the shadowy nature of the job means you can't just go by yelp reviews.

Re:It's the dose that makes the poison

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The problem with Fentanyl isn't Fentanyl pills... it's Fentanyl spiked heroin/whatever. Cause that lets them cut the underlying drug more. So, you have heroin of unknown quality and it's too strong.

Part of it is the various tolerances, but a bigger problem is the difficultly measuring (as you point out) and evenly mixing the Fentanyl into the drug. Also, it's so damn potent that trying to clean up drugs left behind by addicts, even with gloves, can aerosolize enough to kill people. Like cops or bereaved parents.

A big part of the solution is Fentanyl testing kits for illegal drugs, to prove they are pure.

Re:It's the dose that makes the poison

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

Drug-detection kits should be sold in every drugstore, but that's not going to happen as it would be seen as somehow "enabling" drug use. The only detection kits the government will ever support over-the-counter are the kind that detect it only after a person has consumed them (i.e. too late to save the user, but good for persecution/prosecution of the user).

Re:It's the dose that makes the poison

[shplopt]

The potency is definitely a large part of the commercial appeal of fentanyl analogs - similar to the way beer gave way to liquor during prohibition - but I'd argue that an even bigger driver is that it's fully synthetic. Heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, etc. all rely on access to large quantities of poppy straw. Combine that with the proliferation of grey market Chinese and Indian labs and you've literally got a recipe for disaster.

There could be a time in the near future where it will be possible to "home brew" traditional opiates with genetically modified yeasts. I don't know how viable or realistic that scenario is, but it does sound like it will at least be technically possible very soon.

Meanwhile the FDA is spending a lot of time and energy trying to ban kratom, a plant which researchers hope will point the way to new analgesics that don't cause respiratory depression. Y'know, the thing that kills people.

Interesting times.

Re:It's the dose that makes the poison

[Luckyo]

So enable every neighbourhood kid to be a Fentanyl pusher when his dad loses his job. That's going to help things.

Have you ever read about Opium Wars and what opiates that are freely available do to a nation? There's a reason why China is the key supplier of this stuff. They know from first hand experience how large nations are undermined. And it's in their geopolitical interest to have Western majors to implode on themselves just like China imploded on itself due to opium in 1800s.

Re: It's the dose that makes the poison

[GameboyRMH]

Sometimes they do want to kill a customer, as an advertising tactic. They intentionally slip a fatal dose of fentanyl into some heroin for example, and sell it to a customer they can afford to lose. This death sends up a beacon, making other junkies think that this dealer has "the good stuff" on the assumption that it was purity/potency that caused the overdose and not intentional contamination.

Re: It's the dose that makes the poison

[Hognoxious]

That relies on the active ingredient being evenly distributed in the inert carrier, i.e. perfect mixing.

Re:It's the dose that makes the poison

[demonlapin]

Fentanyl is a terrible substance. It has its uses, but they are very limited. It's an extremely short-acting drug, so it doesn't provide good long-term pain relief unless used in a patch, in which case why not use extended-release morphine? It's really good for the induction of anesthesia, because it blunts the painful process of being intubated but doesn't last so long that it keeps you from breathing at the end of the case. Other than that, I don't use it on my patients, and I'm an anesthesiologist.

Dilution isn't a bad idea, and it's what we do - hospital fentanyl comes in 50 mcg/mL, so for one gram of solution you have 50 mcg of agent. 0.005%. Easy to fuck it up, or make it uneven. Even if you recrystallize it yourself to get clean product... it's risky as hell. I'd pump myself full of naloxone (opioid antagonist) before I'd even consider working with the powdered drug unless it was in a fully sealed drybox or similar.

I knew one guy who used to shoot fentanyl - the hospital-grade, known-strength stuff. He'd start an IV on himself. He'd then squirt a vial of naloxone into a small bag of saline, and hook that up to the IV. Then he would pinch it off and shoot up. If he passed out, the naloxone would start flowing, and he'd come back to life... that's roughly the level of precaution required when you know exactly what you're getting.

Re:Societal ills

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

What if the user got hooked on opiods in the first place because his government-sanctioned doctor prescribed him drugs from a government-sanctioned pharmaceutical manufacturer?

It makes sense...

[SvnLyrBrto]

Drug dealers are not, by preference, killers. They're business owners. And they don't want corpses. They want repeat customers. And you can't go back for more if you're dead from an overdose.

Now imagine the deadly potency of homeopathics...

[ffkom]

where the effect becomes stronger with dilution, so you can easily accidentally kill your patient when re-using any equipment that came into contact with some substance before.

Ok, just joking here, Homeopathy is fraudulent quackery, and of course there is no such thing as increasing effect with increasing dilution.

Re: there is no such thing as "dark web"

[ShanghaiBill]

Most pot dealers would balk at the idea of selling fentanyl.

That is good. We may not have politicians who act in our best interest, but at least we can count on the drug dealers to provide moral leadership.

Re: But Poohbear's Heroin A-OK

[Luckyo]

That's not how Chinese system works. They literally don't have ruling families on a principle. If you're a member of the elite, your children just get a shot at ruling a small township in the middle of nowhere.

After that, it's almost all merit if they want to advance, which is why they largely lack actual dynasties. And if you fuck with drugs beyond what party leadership approves of (i.e. sabotage of geopolitical opponents) and someone high up finds out, it's not just noose for you. It's exile from party leadership for the father. You're certainly allowed to do dirty things for the state, which is viewed as patriotic. But the moment you turn that against the interests of the state and someone high up finds out, you're just fucked.