Opioids Where is the fentanyl COMING from? And why is there so much of it?

[gauchoamigo]

Just a short note to say that of all the Opioids, fentanyl and its analogs are the easiest to synthesise 'in the kitchen'.
You can check out the old Rhodium archive if you like; I believe there is even a 'one-pot' synthesis described which would take only High School Chemistry to understand and to achieve, assuming you have the required other equipment than the 'pot' which is used for making the intermediates.

 

[Phil.McKeer]

I love your outlook on drug prohibition, the treatment of pain patients, the media hype, etc.

Like many have mentioned below, I surmise the vast majority of fent/analogues making their way into the US and winding up in our heroin supply is being purchased through the dark web from China.

Those laboratories are unscrupulous. They may be private, relatively small operations or it can be coming from the same large labs that are supplying the US with it's legal pharmaceutical opioids, just making more and selling it on the side.

Not only will the operators of these Chinese labs do whatever it takes to make an extra buck, but I bet (although I have no clear proof of this) that the CCP puts quotas on these corporations and somewhat forces their hands into doing it.

 

[SKR]

just to clear something up which is sort of minute in the overall picture of your questions, "china white" was originally very pure heroin produced in southeast asia because of production location and because of it's color used by soldiers in vietnam. the name "china white" was used again but for a fentanyl analog produced in 1976 called alpha-Methylfentanyl because whoever created it or used it wanted it to be synonomous with good pure heroin as a marketing stradegy.

Yes. I live in Australia and certainly in my circle in the mid to late 90's China White was a high purity Heroin. It has the rush and the legs, and you didn't apply heat, you just add room temp water it vanishes, you draw it up and shoot and BAM. There was no Fent in that gear. Lots of folks complain about us being to far away from anywhere to get good drugs and yet we're closer to the Golden Triangle than many developed nations and those backyard meth labs and recipes largely originated here and through the biker clubs were sold throughout the world mostly the US and from there well it became very popular.

But if you cannot get good Heroin in this country it's a simple case of not being close enough to the source. The Vietnamese were the ones who last had the H market supplied last I knew of. And unless it's being made locally by our oldest crime families (Italian mob) which it is in Melbourne and in transported out of there by kilos upon kilos weekly then your asians again are going to have the largely high purity meth too (not locally made but imported).

We aren't as isolated as one may think. For coke, well that's an issue, yes we come last before New Zealand when it comes to the supply line so a large portion of what is found on the street is complete garbage.

 

[Slow_Mobius]

The pharmaceutical companies make too much money off of opioid addiction. There are plenty of potential drugs--even different opioids--that are less addictive or work by increasing pain threshold (kind of an opposite function to opioids), and how many have pharmaceutical companies tried taking through clinical trials? None that that I can think of.

In my opinion, the war on drugs has more to do with the US federal government covering up its involvement with illicit opiate production (like heroin). I've dug through this for years, and there is so much evidence that the US is directly involved maintaining opium production in the middleast. Hell, we didn't bother with the Taliban until they got rid of poppy cultivation. And guess what happened after we invaded? Record high poppy cultivation in Afghanistan

 

[Querencia]

Hey guys-- thanks to everyone for their replies. It's really cleared things up for me. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it'll make for a good article (well, also fortunately because that would be one more thing for me to do for not very much money), since "people get it from China because it's cheap and easy to make" isn't as sexy as "corporations push dangerous meds irresponsibly, flood the market with fent making it super easy to find, and now it's killing people," which was my initial belief. Pretty much everyone is saying, "Fentanyl is so easy to get because it's so easy for suppliers to get." Which is basically like saying "people listen to Katy Perry because she's on the radio a lot and iTunes prioritizes her music." Not exactly groundbreaking stuff.

BUT--actually, there's one thing I haven't looked at yet. In Montreal, we got hit with the fentanyl starting about three years ago, and it seems like it peaked two years ago. Sounds like it's been hitting BC really hard, and i know last year it was in the east coast of the United States. Is there some reason why suddenly it started appearing a few years ago? Or is that just the coincidence with the rise of the dark net? (That's a subject that's been written about to death by people like DailyDot and Gawker long before it made it to the Times and the big leagues, so nothing really exciting there.)

To the person who suggested I was a cop, given my willingness to privately provide whatever kind of identifying information you want, tied to my reporting on police brutality in Montreal AND to my volunteering with the homeless (whom the Montreal police seem to consider shooting targets), I don't know where you got that idea. But I don't consider it a fucking compliment to be called a cop, especially not for asking basic drugs-101 questions that I'm sure the damned DEA/RCMP wouldn't go around asking. I'm not 100% sure what this forum is like and whether it's considered cool to accuse someone of being a cop because they ask very wide open questions specifically asking folks NOT to incriminate themselves or someone who isn't them, but in my circle of friends that sort of thing is a reasonably serious insult.

 

[tacodude]

You honestly couldn't have told the person better. It's just stupid and paranoid to think that way of you, and on top of that it's extremely disrespectful.

 

[Querencia]

Thanks. Like I said above, I'm coming from a punk rock background--and also an anarchist background. I'm not here to debate politics with anybody, and I don't want to get on about how policing could be done better, how we could implement more rigid citizen oversight of police and obviously end the drug war. But a narc is a special kind of cop--one that in my book is especially low down. Unless someone gives you PRETTY GOOD reason to think they're a damned narc you'd best not call them a cop. Especially when the cops in their town teargassed and pepper-sprayed the ever-loving shit out of them back during the 2012 student uprising. Which, yes, I was involved in as a supporter. But again, definitely not here to talk politics. Just trying to get some good info about the fentanyl problem.

All of this leads back to the inevitable conclusion, however-- if we legalized heroin as something people could get a prescription for (or whatever the portuguese model is) then people would KNOW what the fuck it was they were shooting and they'd stop dying. As it is I worry about people i care about every damned day out there buying what they HOPE is H, or Oxy, or Dilaudid, but having no idea really.

 

[svacheme3]

Ya know, I'm really tired of the 'corporations irresponsibly created the opioid epidemic due to greed' trope. You admitted that's not apparently the case with fentanyl but if you believe that I bet you still believe the OxyContin side of it. And no matter what mainstream media says, it's total bullshit. What happened was that they pushed for prescribing for non-terminal conditions. Long-term chronic pain. This is a GOOD thing- pain is STILL severely undertreated and at no point was serious pain relief easy for most people to obtain, save for a few criminal operations. The addiction risk (physical dependence is not addiction) for people who aren't already drug abusers is remarkably small, and the primary factors that lead to it are externally created: unable to obtain adequate relief, and being forced to reduce or stop when not ready. The idea that doctors have been too liberal with opiate prescriptions is a gross myth predicated on the idea that most people should live with as much pain as they can possibly bear, with as little relief just to take the edge off as possible, just to prevent 1% of patients from abusing their meds. And don't for a second think Purdue et al. somehow convinced doctors there was somehow less addiction risk... have you seen how tough it is to get through the MCAT, med school, and USMLE step 1-3? Not a chance in hell a single doctor in this country thought for a minute any full agonist opioid wasn't essentially interchangeable with morphine. Not a chance. People maintained on what THEY consider enough opiates are completely stable and not medically in danger; there is no legitimate reason other than fear of the DEA to not prescribe as much pain relief as the person needs. And even if they're using it to "get high", medically speaking they're FAR better off in a single doctor's care than any other way of satisfying that need.
It just really makes me sick when even some people nominally against the drug war think pain prescriptions were EVER at a point where severe, chronic pain for 99% of people is severely undertreated.

 

[Querencia]

I think I've made it clear that I don't think the opiate addiction epidemic really has anything to do with corporations--people who are addicted to drugs of any kind are that way because they live with psychological pain that makes their lives unlivable without analgesia. Also, I've been quite clear that as the spouse of a person living with chronic pain that only opiate-based medication makes somewhat livable I understand how difficult it is for a person living in terrible pain to exist without the intervention of opiates, which may not be perfect (certainly my wife finds her meds a balance of pain-killing and making-her-feel-like-shit-in-new-ways) but is close to the only thing we have at the moment.

I don't think that doctors are as infallible as you think, however, and I do think that those who are not responsible in their studies and their reading may be swayed by pharmaceutical marketers. Perhaps you think this is not the case, so we stand divided there. The case of the doctor profiled in the New Yorker article I cited above seems to be a great example of a very well-meaning yet also naive doctor willing to believe some absolute hogwash peddled by pharma-corp representatives. I personally think that what that doctor was doing was valuable: he was providing pain relief, and yes, some of his patients used those drugs to relieve other kinds of pain than physical, but that's not something I believe anyone should ever go to jail over.

What I was getting at was simply this: I believed, at the beginning of this post (and I have since been better informed thanks to the people here who responded and filled me in) that pharma-marketers flooded the white market with fent in a variety of forms, making it easily accessible to the grey market and pushed into the black. I was wrong about that. At no time did I ever intimate that they were also responsible for addictions of any kind--simply that they had changed the shape of the opiate-painkiller marketplace. Because as I also said, I don't really understand why fentanyl burst onto the scene so suddenly circa 2013. Something must have happened and I guess maybe it's the dark web. But before that, in my town, Dilaudid was almost puzzlingly cheap, so if you had a habit and couldn't afford H or morphine then you could take care of yourself for surprisingly little money. I was surprised to see that market supplanted by fent which is apparently even cheaper. That's what I was getting at, that I thought the intervention of marketers changed the shape of the market for opiate meds. I've since been corrected on that and I appreciate it.

 

[mike.vick]

comming from the governments illegalization of opiates. There should be legal codeine with asprin and legal drugs with a monthly linit like pseudephed. It works for psuedephed and that stuff is made right into meth at 9grams a month. 1 gram a month of cocaine would be benneficial to society and do no harm at all.

PLUS one fentanyl balloon up a mexican's ass is equal potency to 1500 morphine balloons up a mexican's ass. BOTTOM LINE. If it didn't come from a mexican;s ass then it would be a derivitive of poppy, not fentanyl, that we could enjoy legally