What's in 155 samples sold as cocaine?

How often are drug types found together in confirmed drug checking results?

A given drug sample can have multiple positive results. On way to examine these results is to look at how often things occur together. In the heatmaps below, we present the percentage of samples testing positive for the pair of drugs or drug categories listed (ignoring the presence of all other drugs). The diagonal (where the column name and row name are the same) represents those samples testing positive for only that drug category (these samples may have tested positive for a drug category not listed here). The rows and columns are ordered from largest to smallest share of drug checking samples, alone or in combination. For more details on drug categories named, click here.

For example, if you mouse over the row marked Fentanyl analogues and the column marked Fentanyl, you can see that one sample was positive for fentanyl and for at least one fentanyl analogue, with the Cocaine and Fentanyl analogues cell indicating this sample was not positive for cocaine. The Cocaine alone cell (Cocaine row and Cocaine column) indicates that nearly 85% of the samples were positive for cocaine and no other category here. If you move along the Cocaine row (or column) you can see the share of all samples that tested positive for cocaine itself and that other drug type. The Phenethylamines alone cell indicates that another sample not positive for cocaine had one or more phenethylamines and no other drug category shown here. Five samples were positive for methamphetamine alone and one for fentanyl alone. Two samples were positive for no drug category in the matrix. Together, that is 10 of the 155 samples that had no cocaine.

Data notes

Drug testing sites can do little about potential cross-contamination: The container a client used may or may not have been used before. Therefore, any unusual combination may be due to cross-contamination and not represent drugs actually sold together. Results are cumulative and reflect all confirmatory testing results as of 12:15PM PST 17 December 2024.

What's in things sold as...