Fentanyl and Fentapills: Why You Can’t Trust (Seemingly) Prescription Medication

According to the CDC, fentanyl overdoses have become the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.

Whether or not you have ever bought prescription drugs from a dealer or anyone who is not a pharmacist, without a doubt, you know someone who has at one time or another.

In high schools and colleges, in particular, prescription drugs make their way through the student body for reasons spanning from recreation, studying, and simple pain relief. I remember hearing from friends that they scored Xanax, Percocet, Adderall, etc., from friends, distant dealers, or even on the dark web. Social media and the dark web made buying and selling prescription medications easy. Whether or not you had a prescription for medication, if you wanted something you merely had to ask around.

The same is true today. Prescription pills are everywhere. If you don’t have a friend with prescription medication, then you probably have a friend who knows someone who does, or in many cases, someone with access to what they believe are prescription medications.

Prescription medications in many people’s minds seem safer than buying a mysterious dime bag of white powder that you have to take the word of the dealer that it is in fact cocaine, ketamine, or whathaveyou. Prescription medications on the other hand are pills that are pressed and therefore have specific marks on them that identify them as such.

However, the identifying features of pressed pills are now being replicated with fake pills. Pill presses can be easily purchased online so that drug traffickers can produce fake pills that look exactly like their legitimate counterparts. And when I say “exactly like”, I am being completely literal. When done “right” (for lack of a better word), they are indistinguishable, not even the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the pill will be able to tell the difference between one of their pills and a fake just by examining its appearance.

So you may be thinking, well you can just start testing the pills right? Wrong. This is where the problem with fentanyl really spirals out of control with fentapills or any drug laced with fentanyl. The way that drug traffickers lace their drugs is not an exact process. This means that any two pills in a batch may have different amounts of fentanyl. One could be completely harmless and the next could contain a fatal dose.

So then, you just test part of each pill right? Wrong again. Each individual pill does not likely contain a homogenous mix of the fentanyl, meaning that even if you were to know for certain a given pill has a lethal dose of fentanyl, you can’t guarantee where in the pill the fentanyl is located. Meaning that you can test individual pills (or bags of drugs) for fentanyl and get a negative result even though there may be a lethal dose.

Think about it like this: say you were blindfolded and asked to test whether a cookie has chocolate chips in it. If you’re fed only one piece and it doesn’t have chocolate chips in it, you wouldn’t be stupid for guessing that it’s not a chocolate chip cookie. It’s the same with fentapills. Testing a piece of a pill or a whole pill only ensures that what you tested doesn’t contain fentanyl, because the fentanyl may not be evenly distributed throughout every pill or every part of every pill.

One last argument I’ve heard recently is that “I trust my dealer” or “my dealer always does a lot of it”. Both of these tell you nothing. Of course, we don’t want to believe our dealers are out to kill us, and the truth is, they probably aren’t. But to address the first statement: your dealer may be completely unaware of themself.

Secondly, just because your dealer takes some of every batch before it you get it doesn't mean it's safe for you. Even putting aside the reasons we just discussed uneven mixing, your dealer may have taken small amounts of fentanyl for a long time now without knowing it. This means that they may have a tolerance to fentanyl. Meaning that it may take less for them to overdose.

Taking all of this into account, it’s clear that, unfortunately, the only safe way to take prescription medication is through a doctor. It’s important now to spread the word about Fentanyl and Fentapills, the time of taking pills lightly is over because one pill can kill.

There are tons of great resources online if you’d like to learn more about fentanyl and fentapills and I encourage you to do so.

One specific resource that I encourage you to check out is one that is close to my heart and my community, an organization that is dedicated to raising fentanyl awareness and getting the message straight to teenagers and young adults who are often the victims of fake pills: https://www.songforcharlie.org/.