What's in 132 samples sold as Percocet M30?

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

A given drug sample can have multiple positive results indicating the presence of multiple drugs. One 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). This visualization focuses on the co-presence of two drugs and cannot account for the fact that there are often three or more substances 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.

As an example of how to interpret the figure, if you move along the Xylazine row or column, you can see that the 6 cases positive for xylazine also had fentanyl and other analgesics, 1 of these also was positive for one or more fentanyl analogues, and 1 also had another novel synthetic opioid besides a fentanyl. More below.

“Fentanyl” is a particularly complicated drug category as it almost always has other related compounds present due to manufacturing processes. For instance, if you mouse over the row marked Fentanyl analogues and the column marked Fentanyl, you can see that 7% 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 Fentanyl alone cell (Fentanyl row and Fentanyl column), you can see that no samples tested positive for fentanyl itself and for no other drug category in the matrix. How can this be? Because all 127 fentanyl-positive samples also had some other analgesic, shown in the Fentanyl and Other analgesics cell. If you move along the Fentanyl row (or column) you can see the share of all samples that tested positive for fentanyl itself and that other drug type. Four of the five samples not positive for fentanyl were not positive for any drug category in the matrix and so are not shown in any cell.

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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