https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-drug-traffickers-fentanyl-pills-released

Okay guys, I have some serious problems with the numbers here. They just don't add up.

They seized 150,000 pills. Yet they claim that the 150,000 pills were enough to kill "millions".

Listen, I may speak out against the drug war fairly regularly but I'm not a fan of fentanyl, I think it's poison and I think nobody should ever attempt to abuse it for recreational purposes because it's so dangerous to dose safely. The absurd potency makes the risk of a fatal accident way higher than with other opiates.

But, let's be real here. Most drug dealers aren't trying to kill their clients, they want them hooked. So they're not going to dose a single pill with enough to kill a person. Furthermore, they said there were millions of pills, let's assume that's only two million at the most. So, they're saying each pill is potent enough to kill over 13 people? That's just not realistic or normal for any drug dealer to make them that potent. Their incentive is to make them as weak as possible to maximize profits and get people hooked, begging for more of them.

So, how does this numerical discrepancy come about?

This exaggeration typically comes from the manner in which law enforcement weighs narcotics when they are seized. For example, if you have a fentanyl pill with a dosage so tiny it's measured in micrograms, they will factor in the weight of the entire fill, including weight from filler material or capsules that are used to make the pill. This means what when they take people to court the numbers are inflated, and it's easier for them to argue for more severe punishments. Then, when they tell the news sources it was able to kill X amount of people, they're basing that estimation off of the weight of the narcotic seizure as if it were all 100% pure fentanyl, which it obviously isn't, if it's pressed into pills or mixed in with filler and placed into capsules.

This is a highly disingenuous tactic , and has been used for years against people like cannabis growers, too, where they will seize the entire plant and weigh the stalks and roots (which contain little to no psychoactive material) too when figuring out how much weight in narcotics were seized.

But, I'm not even focused on making an argument for or against the drug war here, I just want other anons out there to know what kind of monkey business goes into cooking up these numbers.