What's in the last 100 samples sold as fentanyl or Percocet in pill form?

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, in the most recent 100 samples sold as Percocet/M30 or fentanyl in pill form (which means the percentage is the number of samples with that pair). 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.

Although Percocet/M30 pills brought in for testing are often presumed to be fentanyl, if you mouse over the Fentanyl alone cell (Fentanyl row and Fentanyl column), you can see that only one sample tested positive for fentanyl itself and for no other drug category in the matrix. How can this be? Because fentanyl is frequently combined with some other analgesic, shown in the Fentanyl and Other analgesics cell, or with a fentanyl analogue. We should note that, as of the summer of 2024, other analgesics are now more common in "fentanyl pills" than fentanyls, and 40 of these 100 samples were positive for other analgesics and no other drug in the matrix, including fentanyls. 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, including 2% positive for a novel synthetic opioid other than the fentanyls. Three of the 100 were positive for methamphetamine and no other drug type in the matrix (again, ignoring the presence of substances not presented here).

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 represent a snapshot of the last 100 samples with confirmatory testing results as of 11:15AM PST 15 January 2025.

What's in things sold as...