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The drug landscape has transformed since the start of the opioid crisis, with new combinations of ultrapotent lab-made drugs now reaching the streets almost daily.
- Why it’s important: This makes the drug supply more dangerous and unpredictable.
The details:
- Change in manufacture and distribution: Traditionally, drugs came mainly from plants, so production required acreage, labor, and time, and interdiction involved destroying crops and interrupting physical supply chains. Now, drugs come largely from clandestine labs, which require far less land and labor, meaning the drugs are much cheaper to produce.
- Unpredictable mixes: Because lab-made drugs are so easily mixed and altered, their effect is uncertain. Few buyers know what they are actually getting. Across the country, 22% of drug samples contained 5+ compounds, an increase from 8.8% in 2022.
- Price down with potency up: Forty years ago, a bag of heroin cost around $10. In 2025, $10 could buy 5 fentanyl pills with a total potency equivalent to 20 bags of 1980s heroin. An analysis found that the cost of an opioid high has fallen 93% since 2007.
- Beyond opioids: It’s not just a shift from heroin to synthetic opioids; other substances are experiencing the same trends. For example, cannabis prices per 10 mg of THC fell nearly 60% between the late 1980s and early 2010s. As with opioids, the falling price partly reflects the increasing potency. Cannabis plants have been bred to yield much greater levels of THC.
Read more: The Ruthless Efficiency of Ultrapotent Street Drugs; Why Getting High Has Only Gotten Cheaper
Published
September 2026