> It's not that dealers know their drugs will definitely kill customers, it's that they don't know what's in what they're selling and they're smart enough to know not to ask questions of their suppliers.

Same difference. Why do the suppliers think it's smart to poison their product?

They may not use this logic but it’s churn rate vs. customer lifetime value.

When your product is consumed by people who are at one point or another in the process of killing themselves, it’s all churn all the time.

Dealing opiates is a high volume, high frequency business. If cutting x or y with fentanyl both saves significant money and even helps you extract some more transactions from the customer before they OD for the last time, it’s a business advantage.

The market for junkies seeking out “high quality opiates” is vanishingly small. People get hooked on fentanyl, literally want it, and then it’s game over.

Basically death is where the high growth is.

I wish I had used the term addicts and not junkies.

How many times do people have to ask this. There's poor quality control of illicit drug production.

So it's fentanyl residue spilling from actual fentanyl-for-sale, into other product?

If so, that's a very clear explanation I actually haven't seen stated so simply before.

Basically, yes. It's fentanyl residue in some level of the chain after multiple steps of purchase-cut-resell.

At some layer of the long winding black market route, people will be cutting drugs with any sort of lacing to increase profits, they might be dealing with multiple different kinds of drugs in high volume and use fentanyl to cut their heroin/opiates to get more potency out of less product. When using some tool that wasn't cleaned properly and still has residues of fentanyl (which has a ridiculous high ratio of potency vs dosage) it ends up getting mixed into other drugs.

A lot of people thought those Alibaba brands were real. By the way, it was vitamin E used to cut the carts that caused the lung problems, for those who don't know.