Their kids died after buying drugs on Snapchat. Now the parents are suing::Suit claims app features like disappearing messages and geolocating users make kids easy targets for dealers

    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      1 year ago

      Usually the people selling these to individuals don’t know what it actually contains. They just buy it from higher up in the chain assuming it is what they say it is.

      The people who do make these pills will add fentanyl for multiple reasons but none of those reasons are to kill the user. It’s because fentanyl is cheap to make and a lot more powerful. You can smuggle a much smaller physical amount of fentanyl than something like heroin. Because of that, they’ll smuggle less of another drug and make up for the difference by adding fentanyl. The intention is never to add too much of it but they make careless mistakes and end up with some pills containing a lethal amount.

      • anlumo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I actually was in a University project once about designing centrifuges in a way to properly mix two powders for pharmaceutical purposes. This is absolutely non-trivial and apparently this used to be done by ear by experts in the field.

        My work was about creating a computer simulation to test new designs.

        I can totally see this going wrong in a secret back alley lab.

      • PoorlyWrittenPapyrus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        I get how this happens on fake painkillers, heroin, and maybe even fake xanax. But there’s no logical explanation I can come up with to explain why it’s in cocaine, MDMA, fake adderall, and meth short of trying to kill someone.

        • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          I don’t really know for sure but I think that’s because they sometimes only have one table or pill press they make the pills with and they don’t clean off any residual fentanyl

    • gregorum@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Shut down and reopen as some other shady, fly-by-night internet business?

    • Aggravationstation@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Besides the issues caused by dealers adding adulterants and impacting the purity of drugs that way, because illicit drugs aren’t professionally tested and produced in less than optimal conditions it’s possible that drug labs will produce at varying purity levels or make something completely different to what they intended, even if they’ve been successful hundreds of times before.

      From Wikipedia: “In 1976, a 23-year-old graduate student in chemistry named Barry Kidston was searching for a way to make a legal recreational drug… Kidston successfully synthesized and used desmethylprodine for several months, after which he suddenly came down with the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and was hospitalized. Physicians were perplexed, since Parkinson’s disease would be a great rarity in someone so young, but L-dopa, the standard drug for Parkinson’s, relieved his symptoms. L-dopa is a precursor for dopamine, the neurotransmitter whose lack produces Parkinson’s symptoms. It was later found that his development of Parkinson’s was due to a common impurity in the synthesis of MPPP called MPTP (1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine), a neurotoxin that specifically targets dopamine producing neurons.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmethylprodine