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Colin Kroll, Founder of HQ Trivia and Vine, Died of Accidental Drug Overdose (nbcnewyork.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC New York: Colin Kroll, the co-founder of HQ Trivia and Vine, died of an accidental overdose, the city's medical examiner announced Tuesday. According to the autopsy results, Kroll died of "acute intoxication due to the combined effects of fentanyl, fluoroisobutyryl fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine." Kroll, 34, was found dead in his SoHo, Manhattan, apartment on Dec. 16, 2018. Police responded to a 911 call for a welfare check at the Spring Street apartment where they found Kroll unconscious and unresponsive in a bedroom of the apartment, a New York Police Department spokesman previously told NBC News. Kroll was named the chief executive of HQ Trivia, a phone-based trivia platform, in September. Prior to that, Kroll co-founded Vine, the popular short-form video service acquired in 2012 by Twitter. Vine was discontinued four years later.
That is quite the cocktail of drugs right there...
Seems like less of a mistake and more like no fucks to give.
Or carfenanil, which is much stronger and is being used to cut drugs more often as fentanyl is being squeezed dry. Carfenanil is just plain nasty, a grain the size of sand will either put you into a coma you never wake up from, or will kill you. I do mean it's nasty, it's easily absorbed(skin/lungs/mucus membranes) and has a long half life in the body. The biggest bust in the US has been about 6kg and they called in a hazmat team for it, and the unlucky cop that found it nearly died via OD from a trace amount in the air. Here in Canada it was 42kg and they considered demolishing the house by a controlled burn if they couldn't get a hazmat team in to deal with it.
Screwed up thing about the bust in Canada, you might remember the mass shooting in Toronto a year or so ago. The shooters brother(also likely the source of the gun) was running the stuff, and has been in a coma ever since they found it.
Om, nomnomnom...
A century ago, most of these drugs (i.e. cocaine, opium, etc.) were available to the general populace
Most of the available opiates were a lot weaker and diluted into oral tinctures that cuts their bio-availability. Most users weren't injecting them, and in fact smoking opium was the predominate form of "opiate abuse" into the 1920s.
Succesive bans and increased enforcement pushed illicit varieties into their more concentrated forms to aid in evading enforcement. This is more or less what happened once the DEA cracked down on overprescribing oral narcotics. People switched from pharmaceutical grade and lower dose pills to street heroin, and when supply couldn't match demand, synthetics like fentanyl got into the mix, partially abetted by the ease of obtaining them from corrupt Chinese labs.
I figure eventually a more or less reliable kitchen sink method is going to be developed for cutting and bulking fentanyl, some kind of solvent dilution combined with a binder which can be dried and handled at gram-size masses, capped into pills, etc.
This will create real problems because what has really held heroin back has been its complex supply chain, from poppy field to consumer. If you can cut this supply chain to a single lab that can synthesize fenatnyl it creates a ton of problems for enforcement. One, you can't just trace shit from "farm to table" so easily, and fentanyl is so potent that in its raw form it greatly reduces smuggling risks.