Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Fentanyl is nothing compared to carfentanil - some 100x stronger, which is 10,000x stronger than morphine, gram for gram.

So much so that first responders are suffering serious overdose from inhaling bags of it accidently.

More crazy was the fact it's for sale on the darknet markets for as little as $150/gram. Worldwide legal use is about 50g a year.

This is what prohibition does - inctentivizes strength per unit mass. It's much easier to import 1g of carfentanil than 10kg of heroin. And I think it will just get worse and worse.

View on HN

Carfentanil is terrifying. Wound up in a Wikipedia hole looking that up. 10,000 times as potent as morphine. Only recently illegal in China. Therapeutic dose of one microgram. May have been the way the Russians subdued the Moscow Theater Attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis#...) by just spraying it over the crowd. It seems that many people died of asphyxiation when they passed out and flopped over. It's considered a chemical weapon.

Consider the mixing requirements of carfentanil: one insufficiently ground grain of the chemical is lethal. And the people making the end-product are amateurs.

One kilo from China was confiscated in Canada. Certainly a bit hyperbolic, but "According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the shipment contained 50 million lethal doses of the drug, more than enough carfentanil to wipe out the entire population of the country[...]". Divide that by ten and it's still terrifying. Dump a small bag over NYC Times Square or Mumbai and you'd create mass casualties.

This isn't some crazy, Bethesda-managed super-bug or insecticide. It's a bog standard, synthetic opioid.

I remember when I first learned of Carfentanil years ago under the name Wildnil, very large game tranquilizer. What I remember most was the speech we got about handling is and how little time we have if we were exposed, how much reversal agent will be needed in the reversal agent was always to be had whenever carfentanil was to be handled.

The idea of humans actually trying to get high on the stuff is insane and terrifying.

> The idea of humans actually trying to get high on the stuff is insane and terrifying.

I imagine most aren't (knowingly) trying to get high on it. It'll be cut with binders and passed off as a lower potency opiate.

Oh those poor bastards, thats even worse.

Wow, I didn't realise that had hit the illegal drug trade. That's insane. Carfentanil has been used to knock out elephants, and it's always package alongside naloxone, just in case the vet accidentally gets themselves.

Genuinely quite scary that it's out there as a drug of abuse.

It seems carfentanil has been made a controlled drug in China recently, which probably stem the flow somewhat.

Still, the ease with which I just found vendors offering bulk fentanyl analogues for not a lot of money (<$10K/KG) is alarming. I knew sites offering so-called 'research chemicals' (mostly barely tested analogues of existing drugs AFAIK) were a thing, but I hadn't expected something as potent as fentanyl to be (seemingly) so readily available.

I knew fentanyl analogue were out there, I was fairly plugged into the RC scene a couple of years back. While most of it was filth, some of the hallucinogens were genuinely interesting and exciting.

Carfentanil seems to be a step far further.

> Bethesda-managed super-bug

I could not read past this without imagining a random corpse in Fallout 4 or Skyrim stretching its limbs out to infinity and dancing and twisting around in the sky like some crazy, drunk harvestman-fairy.

But this is undoubtedly referring to level-4 containment at the National Institutes of Health, which keeps samples of diseases that would potentially be useful for biological warfare.

That is insane. Part of what's so awful about this is how these can just be mixed into other powder drugs and nobody is the wiser. Like, doing coke now just seems crazy to me, where in the past it didn't seem a big deal at all. But the lethal doses of these things are so tiny that it seems not worth the risk.

But what are our "thought leaders" talking about all day -- the dangers of AI. * rolleyes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com