Crime and the Criminal #4: Fentanyl is Poisoning America’s Recreational Drug Supply

Last week, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health issued an urgent health alert after “three fatal and nine non-fatal fentanyl overdoses in San Francisco who reportedly intended to only use cocaine.”

In early March, a 37-year-old male, a 30-year-old male and a 34-year-old female were found dead in an apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District, followed by “nine similar non-fatal events in two groups of people,” all of whom thought they were using just cocaine.

The department warned that people who use stimulants are particularly at risk of overdose or death because they “have little or no tolerance to opioids.”

“Ninety percent of opioid deaths in San Francisco are now due to fentanyl,” the department’s Dr. Phillip Coffin told the?San Francisco Chronicle. “Every year we see people die from fentanyl who meant to use a drug like cocaine or methamphetamine.”

This followed the news the week before that seven spring breakers, five of them West Point cadets, overdosed on cocaine adulterated with fentanyl while staying at a vacation rental house near Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Police arrested the drug dealer who sold the cocaine the following day. It’s unknown whether he knew his product was spiked with fentanyl.

There are two ways in which fentanyl finds its way into the cocaine supply.

Either unscrupulous dealers are surreptitiously mixing in fentanyl, which is cheaper than cocaine, to boost the potency of the drug and their profit margins.

Or sloppy dealers who sell both cocaine and fentanyl-laced heroin are accidentally contaminating the cocaine by using the same cutting tools.

The presence of fentanyl in cocaine is still relatively rare: 3.3% of the cocaine samples examined by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2020 tested positive for synthetic opioids, though the percentage varies widely by location.

In New York, for instance, the city’s police department claimed eight percent of the cocaine seized last April contained fentanyl.

In Ohio, a state hard hit by synthetic opioids, 17% of cocaine samples examined by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation in 2021 tested positive for fentanyl.

And it’s not just cocaine.

Fentanyl is turning up in heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, ketamine and counterfeit prescription pills.

In 2018, rapper Mac Miller died after a drug dealer sold him fake oxycodone pills tainted with fentanyl.

Fentanyl has contaminated America’s recreational drug supply so much that fentanyl combined with other drugs, whether intentionally or by accident, is the primary driver of overdose deaths in the United States today.

Dr. Robert Anderson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that of the over 100,000 drug deaths recorded in America last year, “probably more than half involve fentanyl mixed with another drug.”

However, it remains unclear how many of these deaths are because of contamination or the result of users who mix fentanyl with other drugs on purpose.

“I think the contamination hypothesis is overblown, and it’s fear-based,” Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a drug researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, told NBC News. “There’s evidence from around the country that shows the combination use of methamphetamine or a powerful stimulant with a powerful opioid is a popular combination now.”

Fentanyl is not a new drug. It was created in the 1960s to ease pain post-surgery. In the 1990s, fentanyl patches debuted to treat chronic cancer pain. The first non-medical use of fentanyl was recorded in the late 1970s. Californian drug dealers began selling heroin laced with fentanyl under the brand name “China White.”

Until recently, fentanyl misuse was a minor problem in America confined to local outbreaks, which quickly ended after law enforcement closed down the labs making the drug and arrested the manufacturers, who were often highly trained chemists who worked at reputable chemical firms.

But the invention of new and easier ways of synthesizing fentanyl means that — much like with methamphetamine — unskilled producers can now make the drug with only a modicum of chemical savvy.

Unlike previous drug trends, the current fentanyl crisis is primarily driven by suppliers, not customers.

There aren’t hordes of people fiending for fentanyl. If there was, drug dealers would sell it by name, instead of using it as a hidden ingredient.

True, some hardcore thrill-seekers deliberately mix fentanyl with cocaine or methamphetamine, but most recreational drug users don’t want their pills and powders tainted with a super-powerful opioid without their knowledge.

So if fentanyl isn’t that popular, why has it become so prevalent?

The first reason is economic.

Mexican cartels love fentanyl because it’s simple to synthesize, costs less to produce than organic drugs that depend on growing seasons, and because the drug’s high potency-to-weight ratio makes it easier to smuggle.

The cartels buy precursor ingredients to make fentanyl from lightly regulated factories in China or India, synthesize the drug in labs in Mexico, and ship it across the border.

Every month, Customs and Border Protection seizes about 800 pounds of fentanyl along the U.S.-Mexico border, a four-fold increase since 2019.

The second reason is drug prohibition. As I wrote in my recent Substack story entitled “A Familiar Pattern of Failure: How the Drug Enforcement Administration Makes America’s Drug Problem Worse,”: “The harder America tries to solve the drug problem, the worse it gets.”

Just as the law enforcement crackdown on pain pill abuse created a heroin problem, so the crackdown on heroin created a fentanyl problem, which has now spread to non-opioid users, creating a fresh problem: fentanyl-involved polydrug poisoning.

According to former?USA Today?reporter Dennis Cauchon, who founded Ohio Harm Reduction: “The drug’s spread is the marketplace’s response to law enforcement and regulatory policies that have cracked down on prescription opioids, domestic meth labs and growing coca and opium plants.”

Greed has always motivated drug suppliers, but this time they may have gone too far.

Because of fentanyl contamination, many consumers are fearful about what’s in the product they’re taking.

Several bars, nightclubs and restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco now offer free fentanyl testing strips, which can detect fentanyl in drug samples prior to use.

Stimulant users are flocking to training sessions organized by harm reduction experts on how to administer Narcan, the nasal spray used to counteract the effects of opioid overdoses.

Some are even swearing off hard drugs altogether, settling on smoking marijuana or taking magic mushrooms.

“People are nervous about using drugs [because of fentanyl],” a Los Angeles bartender told the?Hollywood Reporter?last year. “Basically, if you don’t have a stash from pre-2020, don’t gamble with it.”

Apparently, killing your customer base is not a good business strategy.

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