It's not that dealers know their drugs will definitely kill customers, it's that they don't know what's in what they're selling and they're smart enough to know not to ask questions of their suppliers.

I bought a THC vape cartridge in a non-legal state several years ago, right around the time when there was a spike in hospitalizations and deaths around fake THC carts. My guy promised me that it came from Colorado, but I googled the brand name from the packaging and quickly discovered that it was counterfeit packaging that anyone could buy on Alibaba. Maybe my guy knew that it was fake, maybe he didn't. But that's the crux the black market, unless it comes from the earth, you can't really know what it is you're getting.

> It's not that dealers know their drugs will definitely kill customers, it's that they don't know what's in what they're selling and they're smart enough to know not to ask questions of their suppliers.

Same difference. Why do the suppliers think it's smart to poison their product?

They may not use this logic but it’s churn rate vs. customer lifetime value.

When your product is consumed by people who are at one point or another in the process of killing themselves, it’s all churn all the time.

Dealing opiates is a high volume, high frequency business. If cutting x or y with fentanyl both saves significant money and even helps you extract some more transactions from the customer before they OD for the last time, it’s a business advantage.

The market for junkies seeking out “high quality opiates” is vanishingly small. People get hooked on fentanyl, literally want it, and then it’s game over.

Basically death is where the high growth is.

I wish I had used the term addicts and not junkies.

How many times do people have to ask this. There's poor quality control of illicit drug production.

So it's fentanyl residue spilling from actual fentanyl-for-sale, into other product?

If so, that's a very clear explanation I actually haven't seen stated so simply before.

Basically, yes. It's fentanyl residue in some level of the chain after multiple steps of purchase-cut-resell.

At some layer of the long winding black market route, people will be cutting drugs with any sort of lacing to increase profits, they might be dealing with multiple different kinds of drugs in high volume and use fentanyl to cut their heroin/opiates to get more potency out of less product. When using some tool that wasn't cleaned properly and still has residues of fentanyl (which has a ridiculous high ratio of potency vs dosage) it ends up getting mixed into other drugs.

A lot of people thought those Alibaba brands were real. By the way, it was vitamin E used to cut the carts that caused the lung problems, for those who don't know.

> I never understood why you'd supply a drug that kills your customer base.

I was a private yacht chef for 6 years. One yacht guest was the biggest condescending jerk so I made him what he said was the best food he has ever had in his life and thought I was putting in the extra effort to impress him. Diplomacy is telling someone to go to hell and make them look forward to the trip. When I liked guests they ate much more plain simple food. If I serve the most perfect Foie Gras, Beef Wellington, and Creme Brulee to a person am I breaking the law? Heart disease the biggest killer in the United States. I haven't worked on a yacht in over a decade and I'm still very close with one family I worked for, for whom I cooked very healthy food. I have joked during that time the reason I cooked healthy plain food for them was that I liked the job security knowing they will be around for a while. One of the many reasons I became a software engineer instead of working in restaurants was guilt feeling like a drug dealer while I ate healthy food which I cooked for myself and friends. Don't get high on your own supply.

The connection between food and heart disease is not nearly as strong as you seem to think. Heart disease is multi-factorial, with genetics and (lack of) exercise also playing a big part. You could stuff someone full of foie gras for an entire yacht trip and they're likely to be just fine.

My understanding is that people aren't intentionally buying fentanyl. They're buying "heroin" or "oxycodone" which is really just a tiny bit of fentanyl with something else to make the dose look right.

Since fentanyl is so strong, it's pretty easy to screw up the cutting and people end up dying occasionally.

Not only heroin or oxy, nor even opiates. It can come from cross-contamination, a seller might cut their heroin stash with fentanyl, let's say they use a scale to try to dose it, they don't clean the scale properly and then use it to weight some cocaine. Done, you have cocaine mixed with fentanyl.

The sheer density helps get it through the border. Smuggling less dense drugs is just more expensive. And opioid addicts aren't especially rational about risk / health to begin with.

I'm not sure cocaine is a good example, seeing as how a backpack full of cocaine is worth $360,000+

What does that show disagreement with?

Where is the disagreement?

That’s a fallacy that took me a long time to get over. People do not behave rationally. It is as simple as that. I can argue logically if everyone thinks logically and treats their fellow human being with decency respect and concern, we would all be better off. They will simply laugh at me as gullible and naive while stealing me blind.

I dont think it’s intentional.

With heroin, you can eyeball an appropriate dose even if it’s 100% pure.

You cant do that with fentanyl.

You’re giving a lot of credit to drug dealers. All the ones I’ve ever known had to no clue what they were selling and as long as you paid they didn’t care what happened to you. If they were regular functioning humans then they wouldn’t be drug dealers.