What's in 122 samples sold as heroin

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

A given drug sample can have multiple positive results for different drugs. One way to examine these results is to look at how often things are detected together. In the heatmaps below, we present the percentage of samples testing positive for the pair of drugs or drug categories listed. This comparison of the co-presence of two drugs cannot account for the fact that there are often three or more drugs present. 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 4 of these samples involved fentanyl and at least one fentanyl analogue, with or without any other drug mentioned here or any drug not included in the matrix.

If you mouse over the Heroin alone cell (Heroin row and Heroin column), you can see that 79% of samples tested positive for heroin and for no other drug category in the matrix. If you move along the Heroin row (or column) you can see the share of all samples that tested positive for heroin and that other drug type. If you move along the Xylazine row or column, you can see that the 4 cases positive for xylazine also had fentanyl along with heroin. The Fentanyl alone cell indicates 1 of the 6 samples not positive for heroin had fentanyl by itself. One sample sold as heroin was positive for no drug presented in the matrix.

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.

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