Help Identifying a Contaminant in Diacetylmorphine Powder

[freskafreska]

I have a sample of Diacetylmorphine that was obtained from the Vancouver DTES area which had contained traces of contaminants over the past few months. It is normally a light brown powder that is readily soluble in water and has no Fentanyl in it which has been confirmed after testing using mass-spectrometry. The spectrometer identified both diacetylmorhphine 30% and procaine 65% and the rest 5% the contaminant in question in the mixture. The contaminant is of slightly darker powdered material than the normal light brown powder and when mixed with water the normal powder would dissolve more easily than the dark brown stuff which looks sort of like coffee grounds once water is added as it turns to even a darker colour. The darker stuff only fully dissolves when heated. The spectrometer in our lab was unable to precisely identify the dark brown contaminant, but I could assure you it is not coffee as caffeine would have been detected. As reported, the contaminant will start causing issues about 30 Minutes post IV administration and the side effects last up to 2-4 hours. The major side effects are chills including cold hands and feet, fever, headaches, muscoskeletal pain especially of the joints back. In some cases nausea. The symptoms can be suppressed with oral administration of Tylenol plus Advil combination or another NSAID. The severity of the side effects would depend on how much of the contaminant was present.Anyone come across a similar contaminant or knows or have any clues as to what that darker substance may be?

 

[tathra]

if even gc/ms cant identify it, what makes you think we can? about all we can advise you to do is "send it to a lab for testing".

normally these types of threads would be closed, but its a good warning about there being contaminated heroin in that area

 

[freskafreska]

I was hoping someone in the Vancouver area would have came across something similar and share their experiences. If anything it would be a good description to warn those in the area as you suggested as I am providing a detailed description of the compound and what will happen if one happens to injected it.

I believe what happened earlier on in the year was one supplier wanted to cut back on cost a produce something cheap and produced a huge batch that was made 100% of that black mixture that made many people sick symptoms reported were: chills, high feaver, extreme nausea and vomiting every 30-60minutes for 24-36 hours, flushing, muscoskeletal pain, and headaches. The muscoskeletal pain lasted several days, I have talked with other physicians that saw these patients and said some of the back pain was likely to have been caused by an infection as the result of injecting.

Basically what probably happen was sales went down for that supplier and they had to correct their supply to win back customers, so they produced high quality batch for which we had obtained samples for the course of several weeks. After those several weeks, we believe the supplier was trying to "get rid" of that cheap batch that went so terribly wrong by mixing minute amounts of it into the good stuff. The bad batch was a lot darker in colour (dark greyish brown) and had dark specs which are the size of salt grains and turns into murky dark brown coffee colour when water is added, suggesting there is fine particulate matter suspended in the solution, which clogs up a filter very quickly. Even after filtering, some of the particulate was fine enough to make it through. We had also run gc/ms onto that sample and it was the same procaine/diacetylmorphine mixture along with some caffeine and lactose and some unknowns in the freqency response. The only difference in the good or normal batches is it did not contain caffeine but still has the unknowns, and dissolves into a clear golden solution without particulates.

One thing that comes to mind is cotton feaver as we are suspecting now Pantoea Agglomerans bacteria may be in the mixture which causes a lot of the symptoms in the unfortunate users may have injected this compound. This is one thing we will be testing for next will advise if that turns up positive or negative.