“These are very complex drug products. You’ve got fentanyl adulterated with xylazine that now also contains medetomidine.”

With the way drug trafficking works, you want to bring in the “cleanest” you can.

It makes it easier to smuggle, and since a pound of 100% powdered drugs is the same charge as a pound of 50% pure, it’s less risk.

Then as it moves along the supply chain and broken down into smaller quantities it gets “stepped on” and diluted.

Dilute to much with a neutral agent and it loses potency.

So then other drugs get added to push perceived potency back up to charge end users more.

This can happen at multiple steps, which is why we see one drug adulterated with multiple things. The person adding one likely has zero idea what’s already been added.

The only way around it is legalization and regulation.

Nobody wants crackheads, but it’s like everyone forgot when you could buy heroin, cocaine, meth, morphine, and pretty much anything else from a pharmacy without even a prescription…

It was still alcohol that was the biggest social issue.

When we tried to ban alcohol, we saw the same issues with alcohol becoming more dangerous to users and still a problem. So we overturned an amendment to make it legal again.

The world won’t end if addicts have a supply of trustworthy drugs and we treated addiction as a medical rather than legal issue.

But good luck convincing politicians to use logic over emotion…

Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a universal healthcare system? Maybe so many people wouldn’t get addicted to painkillers…