I had this idea a while ago and meant to see if I could collaborate with someone on the research, but at this point barring major changes I would rather just see someone else do it well and efficiently. Fentanyl tests strips are a useful way to avoid overdoses in theory, and for some drugs can be helpful for this, but in practice the market for opioids is so flooded with adulterated products that they aren’t that useful, because opioid addicts will still use drugs with fentanyl in them if it’s all that’s available. Changes in policy and technology might help with this and obviously the best solution is for opioid addicts to detox on something like suboxone and then abstain, but a sort of speculative harm-reduction idea occurred to me at some point that seems actionable now with no change in the technological or political situation.
Presumably these test-strips have a concentration threshold below which they can’t detect fentanyl, so it might be possible to dilute some of the drug enough that, if the concentration of fentanyl is above a given level it will set off the test, and if it’s below a given level it won’t. There are some complications with this friends have mentioned to me (fentanyl has a bit of a clumping tendency for instance), but I think it would be great if someone figured out a practical guide for how to use test strips to determine the over/under concentration of a given batch of opioids so that active users can adjust their dosage to try to avoid overdoses. Maybe someone could even make and promote an app based on the idea.
I had this idea a while ago and meant to see if I could collaborate with someone on the research, but at this point barring major changes I would rather just see someone else do it well and efficiently. Fentanyl tests strips are a useful way to avoid overdoses in theory, and for some drugs can be helpful for this, but in practice the market for opioids is so flooded with adulterated products that they aren’t that useful, because opioid addicts will still use drugs with fentanyl in them if it’s all that’s available. Changes in policy and technology might help with this and obviously the best solution is for opioid addicts to detox on something like suboxone and then abstain, but a sort of speculative harm-reduction idea occurred to me at some point that seems actionable now with no change in the technological or political situation.
Presumably these test-strips have a concentration threshold below which they can’t detect fentanyl, so it might be possible to dilute some of the drug enough that, if the concentration of fentanyl is above a given level it will set off the test, and if it’s below a given level it won’t. There are some complications with this friends have mentioned to me (fentanyl has a bit of a clumping tendency for instance), but I think it would be great if someone figured out a practical guide for how to use test strips to determine the over/under concentration of a given batch of opioids so that active users can adjust their dosage to try to avoid overdoses. Maybe someone could even make and promote an app based on the idea.