The Adulteration of Drugs: What Dealers Do to Illicit Drugs, and What They Think is Done to Them

Abstract

The notion that street drugs have been adulterated/diluted by all sorts of dangerous substances such as Vim, Ajax, ground-glass, brick-dust and even rat-poison is a common one. Moreover, it is in fact a practice believed to be true by those involved with the researching of drug issues, the treatment and rehabilitation of drug users, the policing of drug users and the educating of drug users (if. Coomber 1996) as well as by the users themselves. As this paper will show it is also thought to happen and be perpetrated by those who are deemed to be responsible for such adulteration/dilution, the dealers themselves. This however does not accord with the forensic evidence, or, as are the concerns of this paper with the practice or experience of individual drug dealers. This paper suggests, on the evidence of interviews with drug dealers at different levels of the drug distribution chain that less adulteration/dilution actually occurs than previously thought and that when it does happen 'on the street' it is of a relatively benign character.

Notes

1. The term adulterant is used in this paper to refer to substances added to illicit drugs in the process of selling and distribution. Adulterants proper, are in fact other psychoactive drugs (like caffeine, or paracetamol) which are much cheaper than the main substance, have a similar or complimentary effect when mixed with it, and therefore help hide the fact that the substance has been diluted. Substances which are not psychoactive, such as glucose and lactose, are more formally known as 'diluents'. These are added to a drug to increase the amount of drug available to be sold. It should be noted however that some substances which are found in street drugs will be the result of the particular manufacturing process used to make the drug. In this sense those substances might be more properly referred to as 'impurities'. 'Excipients' found in drugs (primarily pills/tablets) are the products used to bind the drug together. Common excipients are starch, gelatin or other gums (ISDD, 1994).

2. Vim and Ajax are the trade names of domestic cleaning agents. Traditionally, as today, they appeared in the form of a white scouring powder (although there are now a number of liquid scourers which are generic to the originals to be found under the same trade name).

3. The terms dealer and supplier will be used in the text to designate an individual involved in the selling and supply of illicit drugs. A supplier will normally denote someone who supplies drugs to others (e.g. importers, wholesalers) who will then sell them on to other distributors. A dealer will normally denote an individual who sells to users. In practice these two often overlap.

4. As we shall see some 'street dealers' do dilute amphetamine further, but this is after the initial large cut. If the amphetamine was being progressively diluted as it passed down the system percentage purity would vary much more e.g. 60% to 40% to 20% etc. This does not tend to be found by seizures regardless of weight seized.

5. Those who may have been dealing in a relatively small weight of heroin in any one month were often dealing larger weights of other drugs.

6. The 'typical range' is found by excluding the 10% of seizures with the highest purity values and the 10% with the lowest purity values.

7. Sudden deaths of heroin addicts have been speculated to occur when there is change in the context or environment where the drugs have been taken (Bucknall and Robertson, 1986). It is thought that this relates to the psychological aspect of tolerance whereby tolerance to effects is partly inclusive of set and setting as well as drug. In this way an experienced addict who uses heroin in unfamiliar circumstances may be relatively less tolerant because familiar cues are missing resulting in overdose from a 'normal' dose. The notion of literal high purity or poisonous adulteration is often unsupported by the fact that other users also participated in the use of the same drug at the same time and that forensic analysis sometimes shows the drug to have no unusual characteristics, even high purity. The combined use of other drugs, particularly alcohol, is also often hypothesised to be a contributing if not causal factor.

Key Words:

• Adulterants
• diluents
• impurities
• contaminants
• dangerous adulterants
• purity
• drug dealers