How are drugs made cheaper by ‘cutting’ with something that can be even more powerful than the original drug?
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Shouldn’t this make the drug more expensive?
Easy. You get a product like fentanyl which is made in a laboratory from precursors that are not illegal in that country. You either make the product in country or ship precursors to Mexico and make it there. You take your heroin or oxycodone, cut it and ship it.
There are a lot of controls on precursors to ice or mdma but very little on emerging recreational drugs like fentanyl.
In a hospital setting its been used for many years as a breakthrough pain medication. Generally speaking morphine is adequate enough but some forms of cancer are very painful. Due to inherent risks handling fentanyl it’s usually put in patch form.
They’re generally cut with a cheaper drug. Fentanyl is pretty cheap and easy to make. You can order what you need off Amazon or eBay and make your own for pennies on the dollar compared to heroin. You can cut the fentanyl with filter and sell it as heroin. It takes a small line of heroin to get high. With fentanyl, make a tiny dot with a ball point pen and that’s one dose.
As a side point, often drugs are cut with cheaper drugs which have just one property that’s similar to the real drug, but typically one that’s immediately noticeable. For example, cocaine is often cut with benzocaine which doesn’t take get you high but it’s a very powerful numbing agent. For a long time, people have associated “strong cocaine” with a strong numbing effect, so when you cut it with benzo you end up with a product that’s actually less strong but clients rub a bit on their gums and think they have rocket fuel.
lol, this is a fun ELI5
Let’s say you have lemonade that costs you $.50 and you sell it for a dollar. You’ll make $.50 profit.
If you add more water it only costs your $.25 so you make an extra $.75. But your customers will notice your lemonade isn’t as good.
So you buy a $.10 sour candy and add that to the lemonade with the extra water. It costs you $.35 to make, but you still sell it for a dollar and customers don’t notice the difference and you make $.65.
lol… replace lemonade with heroin and sour candy with fentanyl.
edit: cost wise fentanyl is smaller and cheaper than heroin, but it’s not used for recreation. So you’re kind of “faking” heroin by using it.
You take 1 kg of cocaine, add 1 kg of baby powder, you now have 2 kg of shittier cocaine to sell, that’s called cutting.
Now if you want to be known as a “good dealer”, you can add 0.9 kg of baby power, and 0.1 kg of benzocaine, which is relatively cheap, but when they snort it it will make their whole face go numb. and they will think you have good stuff.
With heroin, you usually cut it with something, and then add fentanyl. Fentanyl is like SUPER concentrated heroin, but its pretty cheap. The problem is a dose of fentanyl is extremely tiny, like grains of sand worth, so if you mix up a bit with the heroin, and you don’t mix it up perfectly, then you end up with areas that have more and less fentanyl, this is why heroin and pain killers have been so deadly lately, people just throw in the fentanyl and don’t mix it properly
It’s like when you order a cold drink and they fill it to the top with ice and pour a little drink over it… ice is cheaper
There is another factor to consider. Some drugs are only active – or are more active – when they are in a slightly different formulation. For instance, cocaine, and nicotine, both are more active in their base salt form than in their acid form. Adding something to increase the pH (thus less acidic) can make them more powerful. For cigarettes, they add ammonia I believe. For cocaine, baking soda and a couple other things makes crack. The main effect in both cases is to change the pH.
Fentanyl and some other chemicals are much easier to transport than some other drugs, which is the real danger to dealers, and therefore a significant reason why the price is so high. If you have to drive across the country with a trunk packed to the brim with heroin, then you probably want a premium for taking that kind of risk. That’s just a simplified example, but you get my meaning. But if you can drive across the country with something ~50 times smaller, but just as powerful as that trunk full of heroin, then your chances of getting caught go down significantly, and so does the price.
Even if you’re shipping the same weights/volumes, fentanyl will necessarily be cheaper on the market because of supply and demand. Addicts might have higher upper limits to the amount of drug they can stomach, but not ~50x more.
Fentanyl is also synthetic, so that lowers the price as well. Not all synthetics are necessarily cheaper than possible non-synthetic counterparts, but fentanyl is. When you can remove the need to have acres of farmland filled with poppies that have to be farmed and refined over a significant amount of time, you can see why synthetic production would be cheaper. This is especially true when this is done in countries with significantly lower standards of living than most of ours, but where they are backed by a state apparatus, like in North Korea, or even China.
Let’s say you have a kilo of pure uncut cocaine. Lets say you can sell each gram at 300$. If you sell it pure you’ll make 300,000$. However if you take four kilos of cutting agents and other drugs, you can sell each gram of 20% pure cocaine at 100$ but now you have five kilos of cut cocaine, so you make 500,000$ with the same amount of cocaine. In comparison the cutting agents cost next to nothing.
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