How a single overdose in Vermont unraveled an empire of heroin

tryptakid

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Interesting article about the network of heroin distribution over the 2010s until the present day. The web of addiction and the game.
 
It's not made clear what exacly 'FLOW' is composed of.

Could it be a return of the George Mardquandt model where top-tier dealers i.e. people who deal in hundreds of kilograms of H were offered an active cut that would have the same duration of heroin but in essence meant they could double their profits instantly.

That only fell apart when some idiot attempted to just cut aMF into an excipient and attempt to sell that to make even more money (Grisham's law again) because it turned out that GM had been at it for three years.

I've never believed the self-publicity GM went for. When aMT (and 3MT) were both controlled, he could in theory have made a still legal analogue. What George doesn't want you to know is that the key precursor in the synhesis of aMT is BMK. Yes, the same BMK that's so frequently used to make methamphetamine. So my theory is that he had a connect for the BMK, mastered a single step and pushed it.

If science should teach us one thing, it's humility. The more you know, the more things you don't know (and repeat...) because science is a process and people who obsessively collect papers miss the point. Half of those papers are likely to have been superceded by new findings. They also appear to assume an in vitro model is a GOOD guide to in vivo experiment - mostly they aren't. Then the in vitro models almost always use a specific strain of white mouse and again, that's still not a good guide to how a compound will act on homo sapiens.

GM was a massive self publicist and I posit that no, he worked out how to make meth and how to perform a single step taken from a Janssen patent. I could do that - which is to say, anyone could.
 
Cuts are cuts. Is it really actually heroin? Or jus sensatonalist journalism? You don't like this or that, hehehe?

I think it absolutely is.


Anyone care to bet £1 that in fact it's aMF rather than plain vanilla fentanyl? That's the thing - aMF is actually a highly desirable product to a small number of buyers. Now aMF and most of the fentanyl homologues are banned by (IUPAC) name as well as the scaffold meaning that it's also covered by the CSA laws.

What is needed is for a novel compound to be discovered that like aMT has a decent duration of action and reasonably high potency. What scares me is that there are still an almost unending number of scaffolds for potent MOR agonists. The Mexicans make fentanyl because they have a whole ecosystem in place and have mastered how to telescope the synthesis down to kitchen-chemistry level and associated low production cost.

The KEY things are that at the moment people are only considering the 'low hanging fruit' by which I mean the cheapest and simplest. But at some point it's worth the extra effort if the compound is potent enough hence carfentanil. But trust me, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

BTW google 'phenapromide' and find the Wikipedia entry. Sad news - the example they give that is x150 M ISN'T the most potent example.
 
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