by VICTOR FIORILLO·2/28/2023, 9:34 a.m.
OG Article: here.
View our Fair Use Policy: here.
Montco DA Walks Back Statements About Heroin and Fentanyl in Smoke Shop Gummies
On Friday, I told you that the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office had sent out a red alert over THC-like gummies containing fentanyl and heroin. The discovery came after two non-fatal fentanyl overdoses that investigators had traced to gummies purchased at Tobacco Hut smoke shops in Montco. And so officials confiscated a bunch of gummies from three Tobacco Hut shops, tested them, and voila, every major local news outlet ran scary stories about smoke shop gummies containing fentanyl and heroin. Alas, things might not be as they first appeared.
Come Monday, I was hearing from sources that these results were either inaccurate or less than definitive. And by late Monday afternoon, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele more or less admitted to the same in a statement, declaring, “I don’t have any definitive answers.”
It turns out that the investigators who performed the original tests used some ridiculously sensitive portable equipment whose threshold for detection is .01 nanogram. One nanogram is equivalent to 0.000000001 grams, which, if my decimal-place counting is correct, is the same as one billionth of a gram. And that’s for one nanogram. In this case, we’re talking about a threshold that is one one-hundredth of said nanogram.