W-18: deadly street drug 100 times stronger than fentanyl

[Chip (OP)]

source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/w-18-deadly-street-drug-100-times-stronger-than-fentanyl-1.3445682

W-18: deadly street drug 100 times stronger than fentanyl


Police found W-18, a synthetic opiod 100-times as potent as fentanyl, in seized street drugs.

On the heels of hundreds of overdose deaths related to fentanyl, authorities are now warning the public about a new and extremely lethal drug that's hit the streets in Western Canada.

W-18 is a synthetic opioid 10,000 more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl.

Late last month, police in Calgary put out a warning after tests found W-18 in three pills seized in a drug bust.

'There's more out there'

"I can guarantee you there's got to be more out there," said Sgt. Jason Walker. "We just haven't seen it yet."

Dr. Evan Wood, Vancouver Coastal Health director for addiction services, says the fact that just three pills containing W-18 were discovered is "interesting."


Dr. Evan Wood says W-18 is so powerful, it's likely of limited use in an illicit drug operation because of the microscopic margin for error. (VGH Foundation)

"It's not in a drug dealer's interest to be killing everyone who is buying these drugs," Wood told CBC News. "The danger is making something so potent that a small difference in the mass or volume is the difference between being toxic or producing the desired effect in users."

"If someone is making these counterfeit pills in a basement, and a small amount spills over or is improperly measured, that can be the difference," he said.

Wood likens the W-18 situation to how opium smoking transformed into the heroin trade as a more concentrated form of the drug was developed to allow for easier smuggling across international borders.

"It's exactly the same narrative that we're having today." he said.

Minuscule margin of error

Unlike heroin, however, W-18 isn't derived from a plant and can be produced in a basement at a potency so high that the margin for error in making a pill with the desired amount of drug versus a deadly amount is microscopic, requiring the kind of quality control not usually found in illicit drug operations.

"This W-18, it seems to be crossing over the threshold to where it would be undesirable to makers in clandestine laboratories because you would be dealing with something that is so minuscule in mass that it would have to be cut hundreds of times in volume with another substance as the substrate." he said.

"You'd need very sophisticated measures to be able to produce a street drug that didn't just kill people that were using it," he said.

"I think that's what's being seen with fentanyl. People are slipping up and making it just too potent."

With files from Brady Strachan

[Roman Totale]

Hell, it's amazing they bother to interview a single person critical of the dominant/police freak-out opinion.  God bless the CBC.

[Jega]

The RC Community has known about all the W-#'s for a while.

Everyone agreed the moment white suburban kids started dying from RC's, the gray area RC's live in would get the ban hammer. That's why you almost never see an Opiate RC (Fentanyl is a special exception (but it shouldn't be)).

The fact that ANY opiate RC's are coming to market...as excited as I am (but broke), scares the hell out of me.

[Chip (OP)]

if this RC is as strong as reported then a lethal dose would be an amount that you can't even see, i'm guessing.

am i right ?

surely this stuff is too strong for anybody and should be withdrawn - i a worried about RCs at the best of times so this is very concerning - we must do our best to warn people away from it.

... and i am curious what @robojunkie has to say about this.

[Thoms]

It's got to be sold diluted but I don't know how it could be without hot spots. Straight fent is scary as fuck now.

[Z]

Fentanyl is apparently pressed into fake oxy 80's in the west coast of Canada.  That's why they showed a bag of oxy, shady eighties.  It seems like there is some big traffic going on between some of the gangs behind this, and wherever the labs are.  I don't think that this is necessarily available on the normal RC market.  I might be wrong there, but it's just a feeling.


These guys are running several industrial operations. They have seized automated pil presses and bags upon bags of pressed fentanyl pills, and the supply doesn't seem to be effected.  At that scale I think they are generally trying not to kill people intentionally, because that would bring cops into it much quicker then just pressing pills does.


The article said a few pills.  Maybe they were testers, and maybe they are the next big thing.  At those concentrations even the people making the pills are at risk.  It becomes a chemical weapon that can kill from a small accident.  I just don't see the risk:reward ratio being favorable, but maybe the guys behind this do.


It will be intersting to see what happens.

Hell, it's amazing they bother to interview a single person critical of the dominant/police freak-out opinion.  God bless the CBC.

The CBC is definitely getting better again.  At the end of the reign of Stephen Harper they toned down their normal message.  I think there was a fear of further funding loss.  (Like this: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/cbc-boss-disputes-harper-comment-about-broadcaster-s-low-ratings-1.3249477  Yes, the irony of reading about the CBC on the CBC is not lost on me.  No bias of course.)  It's nice to see some quality come back into the CBC with the current regime change. 

[Griffin]

Am I correct that one microgram of w18 is equal to 100,000 mgs?

[Zoops]

If it's 10,000X the potency of morphine, then 10 micrograms (0.01mg) would equal 100mg of morphine. 10 micrograms is larger than a dust particle, but particles of that size could be airborne for some time before they settled. They would not stay afloat in air. But just think - you could easily inhale enough dust to KILL you if you were messing with a small quantity, say 1g of W-18.

And inhaled particles when they get into the bloodstream bypass the hepatic circulation. I don't know the details on the metabolism of this drug but it's safe to assume that inhaled particles of it would be the same as smoking it.

Kind of scary.

I remember messing around with an extremely potent K2/Spice blend back in 2014 - a small particle of the plant material was enough to completely stone me. But there's no way you could even see 10 micrograms of a substance.

[neighbor]

I seem to recall people who tried it saying that it kept them from WD but didnt get them very high, if at all.

Seems to me one of the members tried it too. Was it 40?