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.

Comments

Don't do heroin, kids

[Fwipp]

Out of all the drugs out there, stay away from heroin.

Re:Don't do heroin, kids

[sexconker]

Odds are it was the fentanyl that got him.

Re:Don't do heroin, kids

[PopeRatzo]

Odds are it was the fentanyl that got him.

Probably. Most of what passes for heroin these days in the chic set is actually fentanyl, watered way down.

Re:Don't do heroin, kids

[Type44Q]

I've heard that fentanyl is added to coke to offset the effects of the meth.

Re:Don't do heroin, kids

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Probably. Mix a little heroin plus a little fentanyl with a good amount, water it down, and sell it as a more expensive real heroin. Bigger profits.

Re:Don't do heroin, kids

[alvinrod]

If he had cocaine in his system he was likely taking it with the opioids, which is a pretty deadly combo. Of course fentanyl is deadly itself. This article has an image showing what a lethal dose looks like so it's easy to see why you can so easily end your life accidentally.

Re:Don't do heroin, kids

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:Don't do heroin, kids

[s122604]

Yep, carfenanil is another order of magnitude in potency from fentanyl.
At that point, you basically have a chemical weapon... It's not hard to speculate how some ISIS type person could use it as such.

Fentanyl

[HangingChad]

Because heroin and cocaine don't fuck you up enough?

Re:Fentanyl

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Did he even know what is in the mix?

It could well be that a middle man saw an opportunity to sell cocaine+heroin+fentanyl for a bigger profit than a comparable amount of cocaine+heroin. And many customers may actually like this better, at least the ones that live.

Re:Fentanyl

[LostMyAccount]

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.

This was an accident?

[SirAstral]

That is quite the cocktail of drugs right there...

Seems like less of a mistake and more like no fucks to give.

Re:He choose to do drugs

[Comrade Ogilvy]

It is more like someone who is known to love to drive his sports cars 110mph deserved to die in a car accident.

I have driven 100mph for a few moments in my life. But I sure would not make a habit of it, even if I owned an appropriate vehicle, because I do not want a minor mistake by myself or someone else to snowball into a stupid death.

Did this guy deserve to die? I would say no. But he lived a life where a minor mistake by himself or someone else could snowball into a stupid death. He rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

Re:He coulda spent the money

[bill_mcgonigle]

or spent some money on a TESTING KIT?

Re:He choose to do drugs

[ArchieBunker]

All these people who got hooked on prescription pain killers and then moved to heroin never once asked for help beforehand. They liked it.

Re:The lie of "success"

[couchslug]

Sam Walton is quite the counter-example.

Do stupid shit, die of stupid shit. None of those drugs were useful to sustain anything worth sustaining.