Homeopathic heroin?
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Doing a little napkin math here, that's about a half an ounce of heroin mixed into 385 gallons of water.
That seems more like the 55 gallon drums had previously been filled with heroin, but were drained and refilled with water, and just a little residue was leftover.
Or a false positive to begin with in the cops don't want to admit they made a mistake. False positives are way higher sometimes with Trace Amounts. Plus the drug testing Labs try to give the results the cops want.
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How many lethal doses of water is that?
with an LD50 exceeding 90,000 mg/kg (90 g/kg) body weight in rats; drinking six liters in three hours has caused the death of a human
Doesn't say the size of the human but guestimating 3 gallons should be enough for most people, would make that 130 lethal doses or so from 385 gallons of water.
Let's call that 1500 liters of water. Assuming that drinking 10 liters of water in a short timeframe will almost certainly kill you somehow or another, 150 doses?
dihydrogen monoxide is pretty lethal
100% of people who ingest it die.
It's also extremely addictive, most people die of withdrawal in just 3 days without a dose
Well, we don't know that. There are plenty of people who have ingested it but not died.
Yet!
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Okay, I really want to know why these guys were transporting barrels of water with 0.001% heroin in them. Was it a con? A test run? Barrel re-use? A case of cops not having heroin on hand to frame them?
I'm just baffled as to why you'd be hauling around eight barrels of water and how the trace amounts of heroin got in them.
0.001% should had been bellow the threshold of any reasonable test, otherwise all of us are carrying drugs
I'm carrying drugs for sure!
It was probably just infused with poppy seed oil, for cooking.
Then why the water. Cooking oils and water don’t mix.
EDIT: I mathed wrong, see comments below.
Just my 2¢ as a complete nobody who likes to think about stuff and Google some numbers, take it for what it's worth.
Of course the numbers here are all very fuzzy, but if we take the inaccurate initial estimate of "millions" of lethal doses at face value (which you probably shouldn't, these estimates always seem to be massively inflated,) .001% of 2 million (the smallest number you can really call "millions") is still 2000 lethal doses. Probably several times that in actual doses since most addicts aren't looking to outright kill themselves.
I don't know the physics/chemistry of how heroin dissolves into water, let alone how pure the heroin involved was or any of the other factors that would play into this, so these numbers are probably gonna be way off, but 8 55gal drums of water is 440 gallons. .001% of that is .44 gallons of heroin. And I believe that would theoretically be a solid block of heroin with that volume, not a loose power where some of that volume is air.
That's an upper bound, because that's not how volume works when you dissolve stuff, s let's go ahead and assume the actual amount of heroin is ¼ of that (based on nothing but a wild guess, easy math and an assumption that I'm wildly overestimating) so .11 gallons, (1.76 cups, a 2.94 inch cube, 416.395 ml)
With the amount of googling I was willing to do, I couldn't find the density of heroin, but anhydrous morphine is apparently 1.32 g/cm³, so let's roll with that. 1.32×416.395 = 549.6414g (a little over a pound for my fellow Americans)
Let's go ahead and call that 500g or ½kg to make math easy and further account for me probably overestimating things earlier.
A little googling tells me the value of heroin is between $10,000-$100,000/kg, so for half of that we're looking at $5,000-$50,000 of heroin in those drums (assuming that all of my many assumptions weren't too far off-base)
So for that kind of money, assuming they have the means to recover the heroin at the other end (industrial freeze dryer maybe? Not sure what the best method would be,) I could definitely see it being worthwhile to have a couple mooks rent a u haul to smuggle heroin from point a to point b this way.
Also gives you a little insurance against the driver stealing any of it en route. It's not easy to just walk off with a full barrel, and if they siphoned some off, they probably wouldn't have the means to recover it, and even if they did it wouldn't be much.
One of the barrels tested negative, and I kind of suspect they didn't just put in a barrel of plain water for shits and giggles, so I have a hunch that the plan was to dilute the heroin down to below the detection threshold for whatever field test kit cops usually have, so if they got stopped they'd just say they have barrels of water, which would be weird but probably not illegal, but either they just had bad luck and the cops had a better batch of test strips than usual, or someone fucked up dividing the heroin between the barrels.
Again, take that all for what it's worth.
Someone else here said the total amount of heroin in those barrels was less than half an ounce. That sounds like they were reusing dirty barrels for some other purpose, not transporting heroin. I have no idea why someone would move barrels of water around in a truck, but I don't think it is illegal.
EDIT: I mathed wrong, see comments below.
I also saw that comment, all they cited was "napkin math" for that number, which is really all I've done here, so both of our answers should be taken with a big grain of salt.
They might know a lot more than I do and started with better numbers and used a better methodology, or they might be talking totally out of their ass and just picked a number that sounded about right to them, I can't say. If they want to look over my math, they're more than welcome to, that's why I wrote it out, so that people can fact-check me, I very well might be wrong. And if they they explain their napkin math, I'll look that over as well.
And to just do my math another way to back up the idea of it being more than a half ounce, let's go by weight. A gallon weighs about 8lbs, x 55 × 8 = 3520lbs of water, or 1596.645kg. 1596.645 × .001 = 1.596645kg of heroin by weight. And let's go ahead and assume I'm being overly optimistic about those weights, the purity of heroin, and all of the other science involved, and go ahead and use that cut that by 75% again like I did the first time, which gets us to about .4kg of heroin, not too far off from the .5kg I estimated the first time, and in either case significantly more than a half ounce.
EDIT: also, I just watched the video included in the article. A lot of the screenshots and such there seem to be talking about fentanyl while the article says heroin, so there seems to be some crossed wires here. Fentanyl is of course much more potent, so if the substance in the barrels was in fact fentanyl that would also be worth considering, ½oz of fentanyl would still plenty for a few dozen lethal doses, still a far cry from "millions" but it's something else that may be worth taking into consideration.
1596.645 × .001 = 1.596645kg of heroin by weight
That's 0.1%, not 0.001%
0.001% of 440 gallons is 0.5632 fl oz (or just over 16ml out of 1,666 liters)
See, that's why I post my math so someone can double check me, I'm just some assholes one the internet doing math while I'm standing around staring at my washer waiting for it to finish
I'd really just calculated it the way decryptor did but the article also said only 7 of the barrels actually tested positive.
I figured most things have a density not all that far from water. This isn't lead or tungsten or helium we're talking about. Also the their .001% value is probably also just ballpark.
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May have been a bad smuggling operation? Mix it with water, ship the water, then boil off the water leaving the heroin? Too bad doing that ruins the heroin.
That's like 6,000 pounds of water for a few ounces of heroin. There equipment is either off by a factor of ten or more and it's contamination or probably more likely the cop sprinkled some in.
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Maybe they already removed the heroin and a little bit leaked into the water. Could have been a heroin "core" inside the barrels to fool dogs.
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The only H in that heroin was for homeopathy
These were always full of water, I promise.
Jokes aside, isn't all tapwater just diluted heroin when you think about it?
You drink diluted piss. Think about it.
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So how much of that would you have to drink to get high? Can you get high from drinking it?
Also
The case dates back to January 2024, when four men were arrested at a Motel 6 in Tigard after investigators said they were transporting a massive shipment of liquid heroin from Yakima, Washington, to the Portland area.
Officials said at the time that the men were driving a rented U-Haul truck with eight 55-gallon barrels inside and that seven of the barrels tested positive for heroin. Six men were eventually charged in connection with the case.
What the fuck were they doing driving around barrels of water?
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Water! Ordinary water!
Laced with nothing more than a few drops of heroin.
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They got the decoy shipment
Homeoperoin.
Maybe the cops have a false positive on the tests. Maybe they don't want to admit it's a false positive so they don't have to admit they were wrong to arrest them in the first place.
To be fair, they weren’t 99.999% water until after they were blasted into the ocean by a hellfire missile.
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This is gonna be a stupid question but is heroin a liquid? I always assumed it was some sort of crystal
Sooo... it's complicated.
To produce heroin you need a specific species of poppy, called oddly enough an "opium poppy".
You gently slice the heads of the poppy to extract a milky liquid. That's the base for a whole HOST of drugs depending on how you process it, but yes, it starts life as a liquid.
Opium sap -> Morphine -> Heroin.
Man, now I'm envisioning a whole series of black market "How It's Made" videos.
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It's typically sold as a powder, "cooked up" into a liquid by dissolving in water, then injected.
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Told you dihydrogen monoxide was deadly.
Placebo
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