'Millions of lethal doses' of heroin were actually 99.999% water in federal 'drug' bust

Vibe heroin

Man, if homeopathy worked, those guys could have been billionaires!

It's used for microdosing.

They seized it for RFK Jr.

dihydrogen oxide.

Is that legal?

Or a false positive to begin with in the cops don't want to admit they made a mistake. False positives are way higher sometimes with Trace Amounts. Plus the drug testing Labs try to give the results the cops want.

How many lethal doses of water is that?

100% of people who ingest it die.

0.001% should had been bellow the threshold of any reasonable test, otherwise all of us are carrying drugs

It was probably just infused with poppy seed oil, for cooking.

EDIT: I mathed wrong, see comments below.

Just my 2¢ as a complete nobody who likes to think about stuff and Google some numbers, take it for what it's worth.

Of course the numbers here are all very fuzzy, but if we take the inaccurate initial estimate of "millions" of lethal doses at face value (which you probably shouldn't, these estimates always seem to be massively inflated,) .001% of 2 million (the smallest number you can really call "millions") is still 2000 lethal doses. Probably several times that in actual doses since most addicts aren't looking to outright kill themselves.

I don't know the physics/chemistry of how heroin dissolves into water, let alone how pure the heroin involved was or any of the other factors that would play into this, so these numbers are probably gonna be way off, but 8 55gal drums of water is 440 gallons. .001% of that is .44 gallons of heroin. And I believe that would theoretically be a solid block of heroin with that volume, not a loose power where some of that volume is air.

That's an upper bound, because that's not how volume works when you dissolve stuff, s let's go ahead and assume the actual amount of heroin is ¼ of that (based on nothing but a wild guess, easy math and an assumption that I'm wildly overestimating) so .11 gallons, (1.76 cups, a 2.94 inch cube, 416.395 ml)

With the amount of googling I was willing to do, I couldn't find the density of heroin, but anhydrous morphine is apparently 1.32 g/cm³, so let's roll with that. 1.32×416.395 = 549.6414g (a little over a pound for my fellow Americans)

Let's go ahead and call that 500g or ½kg to make math easy and further account for me probably overestimating things earlier.

A little googling tells me the value of heroin is between $10,000-$100,000/kg, so for half of that we're looking at $5,000-$50,000 of heroin in those drums (assuming that all of my many assumptions weren't too far off-base)

So for that kind of money, assuming they have the means to recover the heroin at the other end (industrial freeze dryer maybe? Not sure what the best method would be,) I could definitely see it being worthwhile to have a couple mooks rent a u haul to smuggle heroin from point a to point b this way.

Also gives you a little insurance against the driver stealing any of it en route. It's not easy to just walk off with a full barrel, and if they siphoned some off, they probably wouldn't have the means to recover it, and even if they did it wouldn't be much.

One of the barrels tested negative, and I kind of suspect they didn't just put in a barrel of plain water for shits and giggles, so I have a hunch that the plan was to dilute the heroin down to below the detection threshold for whatever field test kit cops usually have, so if they got stopped they'd just say they have barrels of water, which would be weird but probably not illegal, but either they just had bad luck and the cops had a better batch of test strips than usual, or someone fucked up dividing the heroin between the barrels.

Again, take that all for what it's worth.

Maybe they already removed the heroin and a little bit leaked into the water. Could have been a heroin "core" inside the barrels to fool dogs.

May have been a bad smuggling operation? Mix it with water, ship the water, then boil off the water leaving the heroin? Too bad doing that ruins the heroin.

Well, if you need to catch a snitch, you set up a few false operations. Tell each person something different and see which one is busted.

Is it too far fetched that the cops got rich by replacing the heroin with water? Initial suspects would be happy to go along with the lie just to avoid life in jail.

You drink diluted piss. Think about it.

Jokes aside, isn't all tapwater just diluted heroin when you think about it?

If you were into homeopathy, you'd claim that diluted heroin is more potent than the stuff you buy on the street! 💁‍♂️

That's the new big gulp size at 7 eleven

If they're a cop, just tell them it's fentanyl, and they'll pass out as soon as the water touches their skin

you will probably get water intoxication before you can even get heroin high.

Occupy cops so the real shipment just slips through I guess.

Yeah, but it was from a tap so they're committing a crime against Nestle

That's some weak-ass homeopathic heroin, only 5X / 2C (I have no idea if 2.5C would sound nonsensical to a homeopath). Gotta dilute that a lot more times, that's how you make it more potent. Effing 19th century pseudoscience.

Don't care still having a hit

Sooo... it's complicated.

To produce heroin you need a specific species of poppy, called oddly enough an "opium poppy".

You gently slice the heads of the poppy to extract a milky liquid. That's the base for a whole HOST of drugs depending on how you process it, but yes, it starts life as a liquid.

Opium sap -> Morphine -> Heroin.

Man, now I'm envisioning a whole series of black market "How It's Made" videos.

https://youtu.be/6o4zOMNlSco

It's typically sold as a powder, "cooked up" into a liquid by dissolving in water, then injected.

It has different bases it can be in, depending how its processed or how many steps its processed. Street heroin in america could be water soluble or not depending on location. Sometimes you need to add something to make it react to make it water soluble, other times its already in water soluble form. You need it to be water soluble to snort or inject it.

The ATF once seized a shipment of airsoft guns by claiming "they could be modified to shoot real bullets".

The ATF knows how guns work. They know that's an absurd thing to say. They don't make these claims to actually protect anyone.

I think it's about figuring out how many charges to throw at the guys, not that it matters because it's water. LOL.

Surely they would know enough about the drugs

lol these people are fash... don't know, don't care. Just here to put people in cages.

So, now, someone has some heroine on sale!

Joan of Arc?